We are particularly grateful tonight
to two friends of the Poetry Center;
Hunter Wessells and Bokgi Choi, who
have made the visit possible.
From the distinguished poet Roland
Flint, our thanks to them.
We've been interested recently in talking about influences
and talking about the influences of older poets on younger poets,
but there are other influences that are important as well.
Hunter studied with Professor Flint at Georgetown University,
and although he's gone into the field of medicine
he remains a serious reader of poetry.
And Roland seems to have had that effect on a number
of students around the country.
We've been hearing tales of the Renaissance, people he's
influenced from here to there.
So it's an opportunity to celebrate that kind of influence
on the part of a professor as well as the work of this writer.
Originally from Park River, North [AUDIO OUT] Roland Flint
has lived for many years in Silver
Spring, Maryland, where he taught
at Georgetown University from 1968 until his retirement
last year.
He's the author of eight poetry books, including:
And Mourning in 1975, Resuming Green: selected
poems 1965 to 1982, Stubborn selected
by Dave Smith for the 1990 National Poetry Series,
Pigeon published in 1991, and the ninth, Easy,
which will be published this spring by LSU Press.
Among his awards and distinctions,
he's been named the Poet Laureate of Maryland in 1995,
he's the recipient of both a discovery grant
and a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
He was a silver medalist in the Council for Advancement
and Support of Education's National Professor of the Year
award in 1987.
And he recently completed a [AUDIO OUT]
at the Cadillac of Arts colonies, the Rockefeller
Foundation's Bellagio facility in Italy.
He's also published three books in translation from Bulgarian.
And one of his books, Pigeon in the Night,
was published in a bilingual edition, Bulgarian and English.
Flint's work has been likened to that of Chekhov and James
Wright.
Of his National Poetry Series award winning book,
Stubborn, his North Dakota compatriot Thomas McGrath
wrote, "Few have written with such powerful candor
about themselves, and few have celebrated so
well the homely, the mad, and the lost."
James Wright found Flint's purity
of feeling beyond question, a purity fulfilled in writing.
And that purity is perhaps most remarkably embodied
in the beautiful poem, A Letter Home.
Flint's poems have the plain style of Wright,
and the dramatized clarity of emotion of Chekhov.
But I also see in his book, Pigeon, a raucous
and tender whimsy in both mood and language,
which creates the persona of Pigeon
in the manner of Berryman's Henry, or Linda Gregg's
Alma, or Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito.
Effective stand in for the self that
allows a playful freedom, at once emotionally close to home
and aesthetically remote: Pigeon, a plain and clumsy bird.
This particular bird knows himself
to be a compulsive meddler, needler and nag.
Pigeon sings out his contradictory self-acceptance
and self castigation in the haltingly perfect music
of human imperfection.
Please welcome Roland Flint.
[CLAPPING]
Thank you.
"Skin.
If the wood is good grain and the carpenter,
the fit, the caulking, the cast will be good.
And if the grapes are good, the wood and the wine
will improve each other in the dark long days of aging.
The separate tastes of earth will taste again
and change again each other, until like membrane somehow
in and between the wood and wine.
There will be no separation, wood from dark, from wine.
When this goes on, anything can happen.
Go back to mystery.
And I'm grateful to my small poem for teaching me this again,
that my God is still the moment where
the wood is no longer itself.
Where the wine is no longer only itself."
That's a poem from an early book, out of print now.
And I've never read here before, so I
take the liberty of reading some few early poems before moving
to some later one.
Can you hear me in the background?
Any trouble at all when I'm reading as quietly as this?
Good.
This is a poem called Say It.
Having lent my apartment to visiting friends,
I was sleeping in a strange basement
and I was wakened by a crumb in my ear.
I tried to shake it out tossing my head, no luck.
It was not a crumb, though I didn't know it yet,
it was a bug.
Not small.
So burrowed in my friend couldn't see it when I finally
called her to look.
Sweating, cold, crazed, thinking of death,
feeling it moved deeper, gurgling, in and in.
I poured water in to drown it, and pried it out
with a cuticle knife.
Pure dread, I was awake for hours.
Late the next day, I was telling how
fine the previous day had been, how wrong to end like that.
And then slowly, and then suddenly,
I realized what the thing in my ear had said.
It said, "Listen, this will make you hear what kind of day
it was.
Slow, and warm, and fine, a two mile run in the rain.
A new book on the great Jefferson
begun, people pleased with your own book.
Proofs, children laughing, calling.
And most good-- and at the start of your fifth decade,
most strange--
a beautiful woman loves you, so the dank corners lightened.
Listen how she came to you at noon with love,
how you went to her at night for love
and found the light was in you singing.
I couldn't hear it until now, the brown, ugly, implacable bug
saying, "Pay attention, this is back
of any perfect day, madness, the child's death,
and will not stop.
And saying by the difference, will you
hear now which side of days you have.
Then thank a mystery that speaks your name.
Thank every trick in your ear, and listen.
[CLEARING THROAT]
From this book, it's the shortest.
It's called "And morning in."
On a fence post, the rooster simply saying
to the sun, our father, "Hello old car.
I'm up again, and so are you."
Just to bother you with this once more,
could you hear that all right in the back?
All the way back?
OK.
[CLEARING THROAT]
I want to read some poem from this book, Stubborn, now.
And I want to intersperse along the way
some things I'm working on now.
So here is a poem called "Measure for Elizabeth."
My daughter Elizabeth, who's 34 now,
was 19 and going through some confusing transitions.
And I was in upstate New York, and all of the leaves
should have fallen.
But outside my window was a little maple
that seemed to have all of its leaves,
but they were a fine faded yellow.
And behind them were dark evergreens.
And I don't know exactly the connection,
[CLEARING THROAT]
Even now having written this, but I offer
it: "Measure for Elizabeth."
I don't gauge the light perfection,
until I see the small maple.
Slender, full leafed in its yellows
up against the taller evergreens.
The slanting Indian summer seems lofted by late afternoon, just
over their tops to light this tree.
Its buff transparencies fragile to airiness.
As if so near the edge of every leaf's releasing,
a chill would let them down at once.
It is deciduous, from the Latin verb, to fall.
And here before it joins an ancient language,
it is oriental grace and feminine
with delicate sachet leaning or moving
to the permanent greens [INAUDIBLE]
Yes, slender and just emerging in her name, one
arm before her one hand up to hold the pine needle branch away
as she takes quick small steps to enter.
[CLEARING THROAT]
I have a poem about writing in a way called "Late September,
early morning."
And it really came about because Garrison Keillor's book,
Lake Wobegon Days, was on the bestseller list for a year.
Hardcover in hardcover for a year.
He's an old friend of mine, and this poem came from it.
"Late September, early morning."
It's fall, but he's written his fall poems,
his harvest poems, and here comes each poem.
Few have noticed but he's tried everything.
Including birth, life, and death poems, the dying Christ, God,
the ministry of work poems.
The insouciance, especially, Ivan Spornitz's,
Bunk McVane's, and his father, grandmother, Rose, and others.
Himself, he's covered like a wall poster full.
He's even tried Alaska and Korea, Bulgaria, and Iwo Jima,
no visit required.
So now he's trying to wait, patient to strike
under his peculiar illusion and weed it counts.
But something stubborn wants him scribbling daily,
even if it is the only thing to write about.
Like straw blown through a tree, it's in him.
Or gratitude to get up before dawn,
to sit at the cricketing window while letting it in
and then to put it down here.
And after seeing his old friend madly flogging his book months
now atop the Times bestseller list,
he's trying to work up a solace that his obscurity,
like this early morning star, is the perfect light to work in.
It didn't work, of course.
Here's a poem called "What I have tried to say to you."
After a tragedy in the family, what I have tried to say to you.
That there are ways to love the life you haven't had,
ways to forgive the one you have.
That while your brother wasn't killed to test anyone,
his death is somehow allowed by the mystery requiring our lives
to have this permanent pull at the middle.
Our lives are what they have been, unrevisable.
Changed only in our responses, if we are still ready somehow,
for the next day, the next person, poem, chance.
Even prepared, however unready for the next death,
can we permanently grieve the boy
with hating what has become of him?
What has become of him?
He has returned to mystery.
The same one that is our life, mine and yours this morning.
The continuing shapes we never see up there, this afternoon,
tomorrow.
So he is already ahead of time in everything we do.
I feel it often, that I am living my life in part for him.
Not permanently dead in us, but telling how we'd rather
he had lived than not.
Remember our game of listening in the park
to hear the woods fill up with sounds, birds mostly,
from farther and farther away the longer we listen.
He seems now especially to have listened raptly, eyes closed.
As if to singing, as if he were entering the song.
And like the way he usually walked far ahead of us
or far behind, already gone to his own music.
When I think how long it is since he has entered all silent,
it takes me by the heart to think
those sounds like light have stayed
in whatever we are left to be.
That songs we heard those days are from the place he's
gone away to.
A singing in the mystery is connecting us,
if we can stop and be quiet and listen.
And after Jim Wright's death that book
came out, The Last Journey.
And I wrote this poem called Jim.
And it is based on something that
happened years ago, right then.
I think it was John Logan or James Dickey read at the Newman
Center at the University of Minnesota on campus,
and Wright had been out to Robert Bly's farm.
And he stopped reading, and was looking for a poem.
And he looked [AUDIO OUT] a briefcase and said,
"I guess David ate it."
David was Bly's horse.
[CHUCKLE]
And he had seen the horse over at the edge of the corral
with his snout, with his muzzle in the briefcase
and he said, "I guess David ate the poem."
And if you see Wright's collected poems,
there's a blank page that has a [INAUDIBLE] in memory
of the horse David who ate one of my poems.
A blank page.
But at any rate, in this reading after he
said, "I think the horse ate my poem," people laughed.
And he paused with perfect comic timing
and said, "That's all right, I've had my poems chewed up
by critics I admire less."
[LAUGHTER]
Jim, I gave my lunch apple to a horse yesterday.
And remembered the horse who was your friend,
David, eating the only copy of one poem in Minnesota.
So last night I reread your final book again [AUDIO OUT]
among the Ohio, French, and especially Italian people
and animals of your last journey.
Some of the resolved gentleness here makes me cry.
Your welcoming of the blue spider
not so much as this late acceptance of the self.
I was often moved when you wrote of your preferring lions
in his name.
Small wonder Jesus wept at a human city.
But I am more moved now, when you
make me believe the turtle to be a man of God.
With its religious face meaning unswervably perfect to itself
I guess to you, perfect to me in your language.
Holding the book I read watching your father and the fat Ohioans
tremble in my hands.
I close it at last.
And looking at the jacket back, I
bid the picture and your name goodnight.
Then in the dark, I try to sleep [AUDIO OUT] the stone, beasts,
ghosts, and angels of my stubborn grief
who bear Ohio after Fano.
I should have reminded you, of course, that writers from Ohio,
and Fano with this town in Italy that he partly
dedicated his last book to, "To Fano, where Annie and I got
well," something like that.
[COUGH]
Well, I think I want to jump ahead.
Jump a little out of order and read a poem from the New book
called Monkey House.
I seem to need to do this when I feel
I'm being too grave, or too taken
with myself and my sorrows.
So I'm looking for a poem called Monkey House.
This is about an occasion that happened
when my children were five and three in the national zoo
in Washington.
There had been a lot of rain for several days.
And in all of the big creature enclosures
there were, but at the zoo they call carousels.
What would they call them in North Dakota?
Movable feeding stations.
The hay was up above, and the creatures would come up and eat.
And I didn't write about this for about 25 years,
I told about it and I always was amused by it.
It's called Monkey House.
For a while, the three-year-old twins seem as interested
as their father but the five-year-old
keeps tugging his hand.
They've been looking at the black rhinos.
And the father, leaning and squat,
is absorbed in watching a lithe male trying
to mount a big thick cow who faces
a carousel of hay contentedly chewing.
Heavy rains have left the ground a muddy gumbo,
for the rhinos have made paths as especially
all around the carousel.
Twice in a row, the dignified cow oblivious,
the bull has cranked his hooves and the horny anvil of his head
up onto her back.
The exposed pink and surprisingly pointed
tip of his eagerness has been an inch from entering,
when his hind hooves begin to sink in the mud
and he slides back down.
After the second time all three children are whining, "Let's go,
daddy.
Let's go."
[LAUGHTER]
Although the morning is cool, the men's face is hotly flushed.
"Just a minute," he explains.
[LAUGHTER]
"Wait."
A third time the bull rises up until millimeters from paydirt,
his back legs trembling.
The pointy hind hooves slowly sink, and down he falls again.
This time he pivots sharply and trots
away, then stops, tenses and voids with great force
two rectangular turds in a row like little hay bales
slap against the mud, "Whap.
Whap."
In this, the children are interested.
[LAUGHTER]
They shout, "Wow."
And, "Whap.
Whap."
And point and make delighted drillings of laughter.
The father looking down as if wakened, also begins to laugh
and they stroll away towards the monkey house.
[LAUGHTER]
[CLAPPING]
This is called Snug Harbor, New Orleans.
I gave a reading at LSU, and planned
to spend the weekend in New Orleans.
And when I got to my hotel in the Quarter,
the room wasn't ready so I got upgraded to a suite.
And so I felt quite expansive, the whole weekend.
I called my wife and tried to get her to come down,
she couldn't.
So I just did New Orleans things.
And one of them was the saxophone shootout.
And it wasn't in the Quarter, which
is pretty commercial, but way off to the side.
And it was recommended to me by Codrescu, who was at LSU.
Andrei Codrescu.
So I went there and had a lot of fun.
[CLEARING THROAT]
As I hope the poem suggests.
I also went to Brennan, the famous breakfast place
and asked if I could get breakfast reservations
for Sunday.
And the lady said, "We have left now
only at 8:00 AM and 2:00 PM."
I said, "Well, I prefer to come in the morning,
but can I get a drink?"
[CHUCKLE]
Imagine saying this to some worldly wise person
in New Orleans.
She said, "Darling, this is New Orleans.
You can get anything at anytime."
Snug Harbor, New Orleans.
The soprano sax [AUDIO OUT] at Snug Harbor.
Outside the quarter in New Orleans,
was stone improvisation for three sets:
by Black Earl the boss, young Black Victor, and Tony,
white and young.
They were backed up all night by two white players, the drummer,
Vidacovich, and one Singleton on bass.
I liked the plain cat friendliness
that came slowly, quiet with the playing for excellence.
I liked being in a real jazz joint in New Orleans.
Grateful to the Bucharest Cajun who sent me there,
far from the Bourbon Street Dive charging $6 a pop.
For only money and booze have jazzed for years.
I liked how the white guy Tony held his own.
Less hot though, and more bookish,
quieter in the free fall wail.
How at ease cross color all five were,
musicians more and more as the night.
I was moved by the riffs, the sonorous blare, the brand
new Bach, and Thelonious harmonies.
The way they played more things together,
as if they were finding things slowly: it.
I improvised two switching drinks, vodka, Jack Daniels,
a burger, some rum monsoons till 3:00 AM.
Then back to the hotel to sleep for hours,
and wait clear as the stone, booze rinsed in a song.
Two weeks later at 4:30 I'm up to say,
"I can still hear those saxes getting down."
And wish I were Al Young, or Matthews, or Zimmer, to sing it,
mournful and joyous, joyful, and mourning, and God.
I wrote a poem about whiskey.
I don't want to read it tonight, it's a little long.
But I was very fond of it.
And it came from reading an account in a Amherst Virginia
newspaper, the headline of which was "Fading taste
for bourbon pinches Kentucky."
And it was about all the light beer, and low cal--
[AUDIO OUT] all that.
So I wrote that and I was at an artist colony in Virginia,
and I heard people in the next studio talking.
So I knew they weren't working and I
went and asked them if I could read it to them,
and they obliged.
And one was a sculptor, painter, and jewelry maker named Nancy.
And the other was Mark [INAUDIBLE]
And so they indulged me, and I got another poem
from that called Gift.
Now here is a poem for Nancy, who along with Mark
let me read her my brand new bourbon whiskey poem.
Not only because she left me and agreed to my rules
beforehand that they must like it, say so, and mean it,
and not only because when I'd read it
she liked it and meant it, but also an overriding
may the mystery bless her.
Because she said, "Wait, first I'm going to lie down."
We were in Mark's studio, and she laid down
on the couch closing her eyes.
The better to welcome my whiskey poem.
[AUDIO OUT] it, all my obscure scribbler's life
I have wanted to write one poem a woman beautiful as Nancy
would want like that to lie down.
I thank her for revealing this, for liking my poem about whiskey
and for meaning it, but most for lying down.
When I go to the writer's last place
I will say for credentials, "I am Flint.
I wrote one poem, Nancy the muse laid out."
[CLEARING THROAT]
Here's a new poem, one I'm working on.
The book that's coming out in the spring,
was taken late in 1996.
So everything since then is new.
And since no one has read the book, the book is new as well.
But this is something I'm working on now.
This is called Tributaries, and it's an homage to [?
García Márquez. ?]
"10 straight days of rain roiled from clouds,
with temperatures in the 50s.
So you close windows and retrieve the winter PJs.
Can almost blot how plump and April
green is the world of your county
now, Montgomery in Maryland.
Everything ready to bloom, but here
is rain, and rain, and rain.
To lose you in one long sentence,
by Gabriel García Márquez.
With no way out till the sky has said all
it has of cats and dogs, pitchforks and hammerheads,
frogs and fish, moths and monkeys, quims and bums,
corn silk and willow leaf, jets and pets, and lily pads, Dodges,
Chevys, steering wheels and rumble seats.
The tin-tin, the sluice and runnel
of all you love wetly rinsing your ears.
Until the old woman dies buried in the stump of her grave,
the colonel ascends only to lose in the ranks
sweat of an allusion.
Some areas meet and marry in the rain,
the state falls, the dictator fingers girls.
Dreams of sun or snow all turn to rain
pouring into the next county or country the next day, week,
month year, drowning the sewers but not the rats.
Until all verbs, rivers, and prayers at flood stage,
it empties into the sea on which just now the sun begins
to shine."
Those moments in Márquez when he described the rain or anything
else for 25 pages.
Maybe in only two or three sentences
and you think he can't go on, and then he does it
for a 30 or 40 more pages.
That's, I guess, where that comes from.
Well, I want to read some pigeon poems which
Alison spoke of so generously.
I was at the wedding of a former student 20 years ago,
and he had a terrific party at Tavern on the Green
and there was far too much to drink.
And my wife and I went back to our hotel
and cleverly decided we should have
a stinger before going to bed.
So the next day, we were both a little shaky.
And I went out to find some comfort,
and I encountered these grouchy New York street pigeons.
They don't get out of your way.
And I went back to the hotel and wrote this,
and then I wrote a lot of these poems.
All of the titles go into the poem.
So I'll read this one that launched them.
"They all began in this breezy crazy way,
and then they became other kinds of things.
He didn't know he was a pigeon, until the day in New York
City when he'd left the rented nest, and her he's
often called a nest, and was walking bad
hung over from the pre-wedding bash to his favorite Wolf's 52nd
and seventh for bagel egg and aspirin.
And his path was blocked by pigeons.
And then just [AUDIO OUT] fat, rumpled, grouchy, clumsy,
and he and the pigeon did a little dance
before finding the paths around.
And he thought, "Oh God, I danced
like that last night at the fancy dinner,
dressed just like a pigeon in the rented tux,
colliding with the bride's mother
saying some dumb pigeon Yiddish.
And pigeon-dancing, drunk and bumbling,
stumbling by pigeon, plain as pigeon."
Well as I said, they changed and became otherwise.
But some of them returned retained a jauntiness.
I sent poems to a little magazine
that asked me for poems, and this poem came from it.
An editor from Buzzard Press writes to the pigeon
saying, "Thanks for sending the poems as requested.
We're shooting seven back, but one we really like and enclose
a copy with a number of changes we think
would make the poem stronger.
It's a little 28-line versicle, pigeon worked his tail off
on as usual, and let's suggest 21 changes.
[LAUGHTER]
21.
Including striking out half a line, then a whole line,
most of the definite articles like any hapless rookie.
And then the worst to P, they rewrite a line providing a bird
brained metaphor of their own.
Changing the line utterly, removing
a meaning pigeon planted with ordinary,
obsessed, and offhand care.
"Fuck you very much."
In his reply, says raging P. But grinning with integrity.
[LAUGHTER]
[CLAPPING]
Well as I say, they changed.
And here's another kind.
"Pigeon sees how this scratching of his,
will be more and more of the center.
Family and friends he loves are dying of hearts,
or falling, pills, or cancer.
And as long as pigeon is staying on behind,
and long he means and wants to do.
He must always court and chance the dumbest failure
to saying almost exactly what he means.
He's not praying for miracles or lost in some delusion,
he'll get out alive.
Or even for long, survive this ugly place
he loves in rapt confusion.
Pigeon in the night feels a little black hole in his chest,
and knows it to be his heart.
Dense with the [AUDIO OUT] a black invisible diamond weighing
in with a cruel impacted build up,
the loss especially this morning drawing all the others into it
of his own right hand his heart itself
for a while, his son gone forever.
He can't quite hang on to [AUDIO OUT] the night boards
in like this.
And finally, the last poem.
[CLEARING THROAT]
I mean the last in this book, I'm not stopping.
No.
[LAUGHTER]
I saw people glancing with relief.
[LAUGHTER]
Could we be getting out of here this early?
[LAUGHTER]
Josephine Jacobson, the wonderful poet
told me one of the things she was proudest of in her career
that she had never read longer than she was asked to.
Usually, it's different, I wrote this little thing about it
that's all title except the first line.
After reading for 35 minutes, when
you ask him to read for 15 because he's
sharing the time with three other poets
he says, "Now for some longer pieces."
[LAUGHTER]
"When her digital clock says 5:55, pigeon knows it's time.
And so on Thanksgiving [AUDIO OUT]
appropriately thankful to be stretching in his pigeon book.
On this one, old one, older and older ones, something in them
still calls him out of the bed and brings him along.
One thing not to give thanks for is 16 years ago
today, the young president's death in Dallas
and all the train of griefs it pulled.
Martin, Bobby, Malcolm, and Medgar, Vietnam and LBJ,
who actually said of the war protesters,
"Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do."
And also Watergate, and that other one
P we won't let into his song at all.
Except for a rhyme right here, "Millhouse, the charmless,
witless, sexless louse."
Well, despite carps backward and abysms,
pigeon is giving thanks today for the living children
surviving love.
For pages up there on which to write.
For the fat bird in the oven.
For a slender one in his [AUDIO OUT]..
For all his days and nights with her ahead.
For whatever else it is at 5:55 that gets him up to scratch
the thanking day, alive."
This is slightly related and it's new.
It's called Hydrofoil.
My wife and I were staying in an apartment in Milan.
And there was a very nice apartment for her
on the spot rental, but it had thin walls
between us and neighbors.
Hydrofoil.
[? "Marchini ?] is the name on their door.
Our neighbors for a month in Milan, who like us
are early to bed, early to rise.
And as we hear them talking, coughing, snoring, leaving early
for work each day, we must assume they hear us
when we make noise.
Especially in the bedroom, which seems to abut theirs.
We think they fall silent, maybe listening,
and so we grow careful circumspect in our sounds there.
With the big rattling headboard, like a curlicue postscript
against the plaster-thin wall.
A sounding board of who we are as a couple, aged 63 and 58.
How often in the month we sail?
And how intense?
Or how ingenious?
A slant or sideways trimming our craft
to run as deep, but silent with instead
of against the bangy waves."
[LAUGHTER]
God, I'm so pleased with myself.
[LAUGHTER]
[CLAPPING]
I was actually asked to say a little about my work translating
from Bulgarian.
And I'll say just a little about that,
and read just [AUDIO OUT] of poems.
About 20 years ago, someone there began translating my poem.
It's a long, interesting story and I'll
try to make it short and not too boring.
Someone there began translating my poems,
and that led to invitations from the Old Writers' Union.
Which of course, was an instrument
of the Communist Party.
And I had a number of problems with that and with them,
but I did make friends there and I began
slowly studying the language.
And William Meredith was preparing an anthology
before he had a stroke, of Bulgarian poems in translation.
And almost all of these, maybe all of them
were by the agency of Bulgarian scholars
who had made word by word translation of Bulgarian poems
into English.
And then Meredith farmed them out to different American poets
to do versions of.
As many of you know, lots of translation in America
gets [AUDIO OUT] I continued to study Bulgarian,
and to try to read in Bulgarian.
And I translated an article by a fascinating writer
named Yordan Radichkov, it was in a literary newspaper.
And I got hooked, because there was only
about an inch of and a half of text on the front page,
and I didn't need a dictionary for any of it.
It gave me delusions of translation.
And I translated the whole thing, and it was long.
And it was about his lamenting the decision
of the City of Sofia to widen one of the principal boulevards,
because that involved cutting down some very old chestnut
trees along the side of it.
And he's a very cranky and peculiar writer,
I learned a lot of Bulgarian doing that.
All of my translation since then has
been done with a Bulgarian poet, who now happens
to live near me in Maryland.
Good English.
His wife, excellent English.
And we translate together.
I read everything in Bulgarian, I look up
everything I don't understand, but I have him
as a check against making terrible mistakes which
it is easy to do.
When I was studying, I got by heart almost all
of the poems offered.
Mostly, children's poems.
And it's amazing how often constructions from them
were useful in conversation when I got brave enough
to try to converse.
[CHUCKLE]
This is interesting to me, and is relevant.
I was with two women one day in Sofia,
and we bought strawberries from a green grocer.
And they were the best strawberries I'd ever had,
and they thought they were wonderful too.
And they called them strawberries like raspberries,
ягоди като малини.
They were tiny, and they were delicious.
And they said [AUDIO OUT] They say ягоди като малини.
There is strawberries like raspberries.
And I thought that was a varietal of this strawberry.
I thought that was a varietal of a strawberry.
And the next day I went to the green grocer
and in my best Bulgarian said, "Are there
any raspberrian strawberries?"
[LAUGHTER]
He thought I was very peculiar.
[LAUGHTER]
But he was amused.
Boris Christov, a wonderful poet,
wanted a new translation of his poem.
They are already translated in English,
he wanted new translation.
And he called my friend [? Lyubo ?],,
and we sat down, and for about two months
did almost nothing else but work on these translations.
And he went on to write other shorter ones,
a whole book of three line poems.
I'm going to read you a few of those,
and a couple by this man Lyubomir Nikolov, who
has a book from Carnegie Mellon Press called Pagan,
I think it's 1992.
And his wife and I are listed as the translators,
but we all three in fact worked on them.
First, Nikolov's, just two poems.
The first is called Axes.
"The axes lie next to the river, and their smooth
handles glisten.
On many stumps, the ants swarm.
Like brides in black, they bustle.
Birds fly over the branches.
In the branches themselves, sap wells.
The axes lie waiting and near.
The axes line next to the river.
Oh, how we horn them once.
Against our thumbs, we tested them all summer
and looked at ourselves in their blades.
The axes lie next to the river.
It smells here of lichen, frogs croak.
Deep in the valley, fog clears.
With fruit brandy, we rinse our throats.
The axes to the river.
The axe heads lie cold as steel, cold as
death with a polished handle.
They wait for us to seize them, and they
rest in the spiky grass."
If you knew more of his poems, you
might know the point that he is trying to make.
And that is some of the things that stopped
working well under the regime.
And the last one is called "In a poet's museum."
"Where are the blueprints for the stars?
Where is the logbook of the sea?
And the genealogy of the briar in blossom.
The poem is a fox.
With its tail, it wipes away its tracks."
That's Lyubomir Nikolov.
I'll just read some of these peculiar three line poem
by Boris Christov.
He has as an epigraph to this book, a dedication for Emile.
"In whose memory I vowed to compress my words
into three lines, to write a book of titles alone,
to then free myself even of these,
and enter the poetry of silence in which he lives."
And many of these say that he's going to give it up.
Beginning, "And the dead will come here again,
like fish to the places where they let their eggs go.
Voice of an Egyptian priest from an old inkwell in front of me,
'Fool, everything has been said and long ago.'" Is the beginning
of it.
"Here is one called egg, tap on him but gently.
Man is still only an egg."
This is called Vocation.
"His vocation found at last, the execution of rejoices.
Here is a place, I will be useful."
Forgive me for skipping about, I just want to read a few.
"He talked a long time, but when he
saw his words would not defeat me he took off his clothes
and went naked.
Work, work, no one has died for years,
but I hear the coffin maker working
convinced his labor is useful.
Butterfly, here's one of my favorites.
Butterfly in Bulgarian is пеперуда, butterfly.
"Her wings drooping over a plucked flower,
she is a widow come to the grave in a bridal gown.
Discovery: how good it is to let a thought go.
Not to write it down, to let it fly to freedom."
[LAUGHTER]
A writer growing weary.
Here, Confession.
"It is plasma, not a bone.
Poetry may connect, but it cannot carry.
Lament, what a sad fate?
Another fornicate with the model,
and you sing her praises."
[LAUGHTER]
So maybe just one more.
"Saltwater on sweet water, what's the sense?
For centuries on your shore, to write words upon other words."
I'm turning now to the book, and now for some longer pieces.
[LAUGHTER]
This is called "Little men who come blindly."
That's from Stephen Crane.
[AUDIO OUT]
The third and fourth generations of them that hate me.
And he writes gravely.
"Well then, I hate the wicked image.
I hate to strike with thy vengeance
the heads of those little men who come blindly.
It will be a brave [INAUDIBLE] Little men who come blindly.
Here is my neighbor, a young man in the street with his son,
who is about six, and has his first bicycle.
"Like this, dad?"
He says.
And his father says, 'No, get on like this."
"Like this, dad?"
Asked the boy, and his father says, "No, like this.
When we take the training wheels off
you'll fall if you get on that."
The boy is on the bike now and says, "Like this, dad?"
"No," says his father.
"Sit back more relaxed."
"Like this?"
"No, no."
And so it goes, till they are out of my hearing at last.
I resume cutting the grass, with something else making an echo.
How the boy's heart ratchets in his voice.
And I pray I never broke from my children's voices
a hurt unfixable as that.
And while its rasping echoes, I think
of a fine novelist in whose teaching
the precise negative word by mincing word
paralyzed student writers.
Not seeing any connection, he tells us
how his parents and especially father
never approved of anything he did as long as they lived.
He knows that it literally and then otherwise
crippled him, that it took years of war and stories, his talent,
to save him.
And there was my old student, who
works with the urban poor bringing us his adopted son.
A black haired boy named Thomas, whom he rebuked harshly
in front of us.
And who said, when our friend stepped out,
"My dad don't like me."
What can we tell the fathers, and what shall
I do with how this sounds in me if writing it down isn't enough?
What can I say to the writer so he
forgives his father's hurt enough to trust his students'
failures?
To see them and see himself.
What can I say to my neighbor young enough to be my son,
some healing words to change him without offence
to help him and help them?
Nothing.
So I tell you, is it any use to you?"
I have a poem called Austere, that takes as an epigraph
the last two lines of a wonderful poem by Robert Hayden.
And as to break from myself, I think I'll say that.
[INAUDIBLE] "Sundays too, my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blue black holes.
Then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday
weather, made bank fires blaze.
No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, break.
When the rooms were warm he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress.
Fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely
offices?"
Hayden was the first African-American consultant
in poetry, as many of you know, as the Library of Congress.
Before, it was called National Poet Laureate.
So the last two lines are under a title, "Austere."
"For my mother who had six children in a farmhouse in North
Dakota, where there was no central heating, or electricity,
or running water.
"Austere."
How she left kettles of water on the kitchen stove for bath each
Saturday night until hotter than needed (add cold)
to wash in the corrugated tub the week's field dirt away.
Blown even into the crib from a North Dakota sky.
As all of us take turns, the young mother
renewing clean heat for each till it runs out
as she's finishing hers.
I offer you her kettle, stove, the kerosene lamp light.
Her palm, for soap, for all of the tub, its velvety silt."
Here's a poem about my grandmother, and about baseball.
It's called Near our Villa, North Dakota, 1941.
"You go with grandma to make cherries farm, where
in her mid 60s she works as a cook, housekeeper, servant,
and your local parent.
Avid for the farm, you were generally obedient,
but especially drawn to the bullpen
because she'd scared you about its danger.
Or for a mystery between the bull and you,
his nostril snorting you on.
The horn where they rasped the name, his male fat sack
asway with jewels you could fix could you just whack it
with a bat.
Grandma terrified at the window, too late,
you dream, to stop you.
And while he groomed his [AUDIO OUT] shoe
or splashily peed, the dream went on.
He's seeing but ignoring you, a great pitcher
with a pesky runner on first a few feet off the bag,
testing the bottom strand."
OK I actually am going to finish pretty soon.
[LAUGHTER]
Early tomorrow.
[LAUGHTER]
Here's one called Henry & June, the movie.
You know Henry Miller and Anais Nin, all that gang?
There was a movie about it, Stanley Kaufman doesn't like it.
And OK it drags a little, but there are some moments
as when Anais tells Henry, she's happy they fit so good.
How sometimes she has to Vaseline her husband's Hugo.
And Henry snaps a quarter second [AUDIO OUT]
that says, "He too has been taught
the faith of every modest male, that all dicks are
roughly the same."
Stan is on the money about June, or the tall invert
who plays her.
What a honey furnish she is, especially with her dampers
down.
But if he really means it when he says the Anais isn't sexy,
Stanley needs an oil change.
Or a lube job.
[LAUGHTER]
And he'd better get that tailpipe checked."
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I'm looking for poems that are short and engage
in certain ways.
Here's a theft from Robert Frost,
and from a student of mine.
It's called Never again with birdsong.
"A pretty girl writes in her journal.
She probably shouldn't put this here,
but she'd had the best sex ever in her life.
Fresh as 22, says she's had her first orgasm during intercourse.
That they both came at the same time,
that she finally sees what all the fuss is about.
How this guy is also fun, the laughing
they do before and after.
How it may not probably won't last, but what the hell?
It's so good now.
And you resist jotting her your theory,
that laughter and orgasm are connected.
Those who have a lot of one are likelier than most
to have a lot of the other.
But she must know this in her skin,
we love to make who make us laugh
even before we feel them one.
Cum funny, honey [INAUDIBLE] when they come."
[LAUGHTER]
All right, two more.
Well, I'll make it three.
[LAUGHTER]
[CLAPPING]
I'll tell you my daughter Elizabeth's first poem.
We changed schools and put them into a Catholic school
when she was eight.
And they really hadn't had, she and her sister,
any religious training.
And the nuns asked for a Christmas poem,
and Elizabeth wrote this and asked me
if I thought it was right.
I said I liked it very much.
I didn't know what the nun would think,
but I honestly liked it very much.
I call it The hard nosed Noel.
"Jesus was born on Christmas day under the straw, under the hay.
He's dead now, as everyone knows.
Nails in his finger, nails in his toes.
[LAUGHTER]
By the way, she was offered a scholarship for an MFA
at Tucson.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't think she submitted that.
She did get one at the University of Virginia,
and her sister and I went down to Charlottesville
to hear her reading, which they do as they're finishing.
And she began with that poem, I was very proud of her.
Here's a poem for my other daughter called Pamela.
She did something extraordinary, and reminding me of times
I wished I had done something.
A former student called me, and his wife
had a baby who lived only two days.
And he knew I had lost a child.
And I asked him if he wanted me to come, and he said, no.
But I shouldn't have asked, I should have taken the call
as enough of a call to go.
And then if I was of no use to him, I wouldn't have been hurt.
I could have just come home.
It was Washington to New York.
Well, my daughter went from Washington to California
when she was called.
She was going to Georgetown. she was working
in a car dealership in Arlington,
and she just went to California on her very fragile credit card.
It's called Pamela.
"Praise for Pamela Helen Flint, who
when Rick's mother called to say her son was dying left at once.
Expensive to fly from Virginia to California to see,
and as it turned out, to be the only one with him
when he died of AIDS at 27.
Went because she's loved him since they were 14, maybe
before either knew the complicated calls of sex,
specific measures of need or predilection,
but went on as each had promised each in love for life.
And so just left school, and job, and kin,
catching the first flight out.
Rented a car in Fresno, drove 50 miles
to the hospital to be with him.
So he knew it, a wordless surge of greeting
at her voice and touch.
May all who need one at the end have such a breath.
Praise."
And at last, this is the last poem in the new book.
It's called Prayer.
And in it I say, deo volente, which
is not a mistake for the Latin, but Italian.
Meaning the same thing, God grant, or God willing.
Prayer.
"Any day's writing may be the last,
he's reminded at 2:00 in the morning."
I'm going to stop to say this owes a little I think
to that Merwin poem in which he remarks
the obvious but spooky idea that each year we
live through the calendar date on which eventually we'll die.
I think it owes a little to that.
Prayer.
"Any day's writing may be the last,
he's reminded at 2:00 in the morning.
Making this year's last Italian notes,
readying his machine and self to get aboard the bigger machine
and fly, deo volente, home.
And so he repeats the 'Our Father'
he said to himself before rising.
And feels a heartfelt, Thanks Lord for such a poem as
have come his way.
Whether or not they get read.
And it goes without saying, few may.
And thanks as well for eagerness almost daily,
to greet the drone with words a question part
by what poets before have done.
He prays to be among them.
One however small, the work is all."
[LAUGHTER]
You're very generous.
I don't take it as a request for an encore,
but it made me remember a New Yorker cartoon.
The usual thing is the fighter is all battered in his corner
and his manager says, "Go out and kill him again."
But the New Yorker had one in which this guy is very badly
beaten, and his manager looks terrified says, "Look out,
here he comes again."
[LAUGHTER]
I didn't want you to think that I was coming back
[LAUGHTER]