The next Poetry Center reading will be two weeks from tonight;
that will be the Contest Awards Reading,
April 21st in the Student Union terrace lounge.
We figured we didn't have enough poetry readings this semester,
so we've added one more.
We're going to have a new book celebration
on the 25th of April--
that will be a Sunday afternoon, we'll
be sending out a notice on that--
to honor eight recent books of poetry
by residents of the area.
Rolly Kent will be reading at Pima College on Thursday,
April 22nd on West Campus.
The last Writers at Work will be next Tuesday night April 13th.
The readers are N. Scott Momaday and Todd Lieber.
And that reading will be in the new Harvill Auditorium.
The Harvill building is the new classroom building
on 2nd and Olive.
We're preparing the last newsletter of the year.
We'll take items for the newsletter
until Friday this week.
We publish only good news.
Leslie Ullman's first collection of poems, Natural Histories,
won the 1978 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.
Her poems have appeared in such magazines
as The New Yorker, The Nation, Shenandoah, Mademoiselle,
Poetry Northwest, and many others.
In addition to the Yale prize, she's
been a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts grant.
She's currently teaching at the University of Texas in El Paso.
I had the pleasure to hear her read two years ago.
She's a very fine reader, fine lady.
I hope you'll be able to come to the Poetry Center following
the reading to have some refreshments
and meet Leslie Ullman.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I've sort of fallen in love with your campus after jogging
through it today.
I can't imagine why anybody would
write when they can just walk around and eat salad bars
and things.
It's sort of paradise.
I, first of all, want you to let me
know if you'd like to hear anything a second time,
especially the poems in Natural Histories
seem to need to be read more than once.
And I feel a little hesitant about just doing them all,
but if anybody would like to hear one again,
please just wave a hand.
I think I'll start with some from Natural Histories
and then move to some new things and then come back
to Natural Histories.
And if there's anything you want to hear, just yell at me.
I really don't mind it.
Just let me know what you want.
Since a lot of you are writers and since I'm also
more comfortable doing this, I think
I'd like to tell you a little bit about why
I wanted to write each poem.
I can't explain the poem, obviously, but I can offer--
I enjoy saying why the poem wanted to get started at all.
And sometimes, what you'll hear will be a distant outgrowth
from what I wanted.
And other times, you might see a relationship.
I don't particularly care what you see.
I just want to share that process,
because it continues to be a mystery to me.
And since we're all involved in the same--
trying to navigate from the point of wanting
to write a poem to actually then allowing oneself to finish it,
I'd like to just share as much of that process as I can.
The first few-- well, I guess a lot of these poems in the book
were written--
I felt at the time, they were written from someone else's
point of view.
Because I think, in the beginning,
I felt much more comfortable not being myself.
I didn't think I had anything to say.
It's a fear we never get over, but I
think as we get older and more pompous,
we can get away with it.
And I already-- I am starting to write
from my own point of view, for better or for worse.
But in the beginning, I didn't and I
found it kind of exciting.
I still am excited by the idea.
I found I could see more clearly when I got into someone else's
skin and that I was drawing on experience that I hadn't had
firsthand, but I had had somewhere
through looking at movies, or reading books,
or just having very intense conversations over years
of being alive that I had absorbed.
I found I absorbed a lot more vicarious experience
than I realized.
So in the beginning, in an incidental way,
poetry helped me get access to those different voices,
those different people.
So I'm going to read you a few poems that come out of that.
I can really make sense out of it in retrospect.
At the time, I just felt desperate
that I've got to get these poems written.
And I'm not very good and I'll just
do what I can to get something decent.
And I realized that I was doing something very valuable.
I realized later I had done something
that was valuable for me.
At the time, it didn't feel so great.
This first poem wanted to get started,
because I was listening to some jazz
one night in Kansas City where I lived for a while, which
used to be a big jazz place.
It was pretty bad jazz.
It was a pretty bad bar and I was
drinking a pretty bad drink.
And still, I got overtaken by a kind of false nostalgia
for an era that hadn't been mine,
a sort of a jazz era, the kind of decadent, smoky, tired out.
And some sort of--
I started thinking of images that I wanted to use.
And eventually, I could make them
cohere by choosing a persona who is sort
of a jaded woman of some sort.
This is called Bravado.
"I should have been one of those lean women seen
up and down the coast with neat gin, a long story.
By mistake, I live miles from water and do not smoke.
This man on the saxophone moans and plans his journey someplace
else.
His cheeks swell as though pushing sound
through sea air and old money.
He doesn't understand there is no war anywhere, no
veranda, no bravado of sons about to leave,
that I am a woman with no ear for an old story,
that my cheek sags when touched, that there
are no more bad nights, that another year has fattened
and passed without smudging my unastonished eye."
This next poem got started--
this must have been after I'd been
married, a fairly short time.
And I was getting a sense of the creatureliness
of living with someone else.
And at one point--
this is very vague in my memory, so I'm not going to try to make
too much sense of it-- but I got interested in the fact that--
in a new realization that we are, indeed,
when I wanted to do something with mammalian imagery.
And I wrote a poem that ended up being
kind of a didactic poem that was sort of too
deliberately dealing with these images.
And I had to put it away for a while.
One night I had been jogging and I
was sitting on the hood of my car
just looking around and congratulating myself that I
managed to do it one more time.
And it was dusk and I saw some kids
walking home from a bus stop.
And I suddenly had a flash of remembering
how it felt to be a child at dusk
when the lights are just starting to go on
and you're about to go home to a lighted place,
but you're still in this outdoor, mysteriously changing
atmosphere.
And I suddenly had a flash of realizing --
of remembering how I felt as a child and how much like
an animal I felt just with that sensibility.
And I don't know how long it took
me to realize that that was what I wanted for the poem,
but I ended up recasting all the images
from the point of view of a small boy,
which I've never been.
That's a nice way of vicarious experience.
But thinking from realizing that I wanted
a child's point of view and I thought,
I guess, I wanted a little boy, because I thought of him
maybe as more wild and more connected with his animal self.
Although, I don't actually believe that there
should be a difference.
This is not written in the voice of a little boy.
It's written more from the point of view.
It's called Fur.
"The small boy at dusk arranges himself
in the dark bones of a tree.
Moths enter the blue air and come home.
His mother leans into it, calling his name.
Her body smells like milk.
Behind her, the moon climbs like a slow howl and his father
comes home, swollen or in pain, resting on the last few stairs.
His voice breaks into the small room.
Listening, the boy finds no place for so many words.
And later, his mother's kiss adheres to him like fur.
He kicks off the sheets and hears nothing.
Two eyes touch the length of him through branches.
A long way in, he hears his parents
breathe through their skin.
Long vowels uncurl in their throats.
He hears his name as less than sound,
a slight movement of wings."
This is also is a voice poem that isn't in a voice,
but more out of another point of view.
And this one really baffles me, because I don't quite remember
how I got started with it.
But this one's called Midwife and it deals with a subject
that I have no firsthand knowledge about.
And not only do I not know much, except what
I've seen in movies, melodramatic births
where the woman is some kind of hero
and there's all sorts of screaming and sweating going on
and I don't really believe in it that much, but somehow
in this poem, not only did I find myself talking
from the point of view of someone
who has access to birth, but I also
find myself reversing what I thought
would be the role between the midwife,
the professional, and the woman giving birth, who
might not be so cool about it.
It really kind of turned around on me as I worked on the poem.
I think that happens when you get into another point of view.
And it's one of the reasons why I really like it,
because it ends up leading me around more than me leading it.
And I needed to learn how to do that
very badly in the beginning.
And that was, for me, the best thing to teach me.
"Midwife.
She smells blood in her hair and dreams
of crouching at the limits of her skin.
Having spent themselves, the new mothers
sleep like men in the scent of what they are.
The pain, she thinks, is the first screen
to dismantle itself.
They did not try to swallow her hands, small, awed husbands.
Each speaks softly on two legs as if the room
had been lit by candles.
It is she who reels in the corridor.
They smell of flowers.
They say it was only the body emptying itself."
Actually, there's another kind of experience I've never had.
And I must have gotten interested in it
by watching The Nun's Story on TV at a time in my life
when nothing much was happening in my life
except teaching four sections of sophomore composition,
my first teaching job.
It was a pretty bleak year.
And I think-- actually, I wrote a lot of poems that year
for me, anyway.
Now that my life's getting more fun,
I'm having trouble getting poems finished.
But I guess my taste for vicarious experience
really got going that year.
And I tried to write a poem.
It was another one I had to put away for a while.
I tried to write a poem from the point of view of someone
who had started out wanting to be a nun.
It's long enough ago so I can't give you
a real coherent story about why I was interested in it
or how I solved the problem.
I do know that I had to put the poem away for a year.
And this is another voice poem.
And again, it's something, I guess, I'm fascinated by--
there's something very beautiful and also very terrifying
about the notion of secluding yourself that way.
And I guess I must have been thinking
about it subconsciously a lot and that all back to this poem.
This is called Shade.
"You never saw your mother's body, only a face,
which fades now without disappearing, like the saints'
faces in silver.
And the nuns, the sisters you might have kept,
they knelt and rose as though made of air.
Where did their legs begin?
They gathered their skirts, like girls,
and you took no food without their blessing.
Now you must think before rising.
I went to him without thinking.
I touched him everywhere.
Within the folds of their skirts,
the nuns rose as though wearing nothing.
They rose as though leaving their bodies.
Already, the sun grows and you rise, porous
with sleep and sweating.
He makes room as you pass.
You remember how the leaves in midsummer
clouded the stained glass and the litanies.
The murmuring of their voices like
insects moving into the shade."
Another poem that-- this one wanted to be a voice poem.
And it really ended up--
I think this was the beginning of my getting out
of needing other voices.
This poem started out from a free association assignment
that I gave to a class on one of my classes.
And somebody brought in a little wire statue
of a figure that looked like it was either kicking a football
or dancing.
And we all wrote about it for 15 minutes.
And I decided it was a dancer.
And I decided to use it as an excuse
to work out some images from a point of view
I've always wanted to have, which is that of a dancer.
I've always thought it'd be wonderful to be a dancer.
But somehow to be able to be on stage and move
like that for a little while every day
would sort of save my soul.
I've always envied people who do that.
And so I thought I was going to be working out
a kind of celebration.
And I ended up finding, like with the midwife,
I found some reversals taking place.
I think I'll read this one twice.
I won't say anything more about it, Dancing.
"At dawn, I begin at the window, unable to begin
in the flesh-colored light.
At night, I am singular and white in my multiple names.
I can turn each of my bones to air.
I can take the trembling when it begins deep inside,
like a gypsy swallowing flame.
I've heard that men are frightened of my body,
that they conjure it in the dark over women
they've made into wives.
My last lover never closed his eyes.
Magnificent, he said carefully, as though I were water
and he a swan, poised over a swan's image.
Lately now, the bed tilts while I sleep.
By morning, I'm stiff, endangered,
like some parchment.
The child I may never have rises, plump with sleep.
My thoughts lurch backward, straining for purchase,
resume their necessary flow."
For a long time while I worked on that poem,
I thought I was writing about a persona.
I was picturing a dancer who is not
too old to dance beautifully, but is beginning to feel old
and is beginning to feel a kind of terror
and a kind of fatigue.
And it's not something I think about a lot.
So I was kind of intrigued with what was happening.
But I also realized, as I worked on this poem,
that I was also writing very personally.
And I think maybe at least I found with voice poems--
I don't know if this has happened to some of you
or not--
I find that I am really writing myself back
into some part of myself that is as much part of me
as it is about another character.
It's just that I'm going in through the back door.
And in this poem, I really understood quickly
that I was also writing about process.
And it's the process of writing.
There's that fatigue.
There's that sense, can I still do it?
A sense that I almost can't.
And so at that point, I changed the title to Dancing,
because I wanted it to have more to do
with the process than a person.
I'll read this one more time.
Dancing.
"At dawn, I begin at the window, unable to begin
in the flesh-colored light.
At night, I am singular and white in my multiple names.
I can turn each of my bones to air.
I can take the trembling when it begins deep inside,
like a gypsy swallowing flame.
I've heard that men are frightened of my body,
that they conjure it in the dark over women
they've made into wives.
My last lover never closed his eyes.
Magnificent, he said carefully, as though I were water
and he a swan, poised over a swan's image.
Lately now, the bed tilts while I sleep.
By morning, I'm stiff, endangered,
like some parchment.
The child I may never have rises, plump with sleep.
My thoughts lurch backward, straining for purchase,
resume their necessary flow."
I want to try something next that I've only
done once before.
And I'm hoping it'll work, because you're all writers.
And that is simply to read you a journal entry
that I did that led to a poem.
Because I'm always intrigued when
I talk to other writers, the relationship
between the beginnings of a poem and what they end up with.
I just don't want to gross anybody out.
One of the things--
well, what started this poem was hearing about a conversation
between two men.
And I wasn't there when the conversation took place,
but I was told about it.
And I was kind of amused when I heard about it, because I've
always been kind of interested in the way men talk
about women.
And I'm not angry.
I just think of it as a phenomenon.
I may not like some of the things that go on,
but I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with it.
I'm just interested in the dynamic.
I'm interested in the way men look at women.
And when I heard--
I found myself wondering about this conversation.
Well, what was really going on between the lines
of that conversation?
Were they really just talking about what they thought
they were talking about?
I don't know how much I need to say about this.
I'll read you the journal entry and hope that that
is one cohesive entity.
And then I'll just turn around and read you
the poem, which was certainly a fictional adaptation of what
I started out.
The journal entry, I think, it was
a kind of speculative rampage.
I started out saying what I had heard about the conversation.
Then I started asking myself a bunch of questions
about the conversation.
And from there, I went on to write a poem.
So this is the journal.
"Stephen said that Hal said to him, sometimes,
he goes home and, quote, "fucks his wife's brains out."
Hal is one of the few men I know who says he is happy.
Curiously, he is not stupid.
He is a good-natured intellectual, teaches history,
illuminates for college students the qualities of our culture
that give rise to wars.
He finds the Nazis horrifying and also a source of humor.
He loves Sichuan food.
He, quote, "fucks her brains out."
As a woman, I try to picture this way
of keeping depression at bay.
He fucks her brains out.
His penis becomes a drill, a grenade.
Going out later for a beer, does he still look at strange women
with longing?
Does he talk with a colleague about
famous military campaigns?
Does he compliment the colleague on his sexy wife?
Does the colleague take this as a personal compliment?
Are parts of a woman's [AUDIO OUT]
to save men from using words like happiness and longing?
He fucks her brains out.
Then his penis sleeps like a small animal.
He mentions happiness and we gather around him
like tourists with cameras at the scene of a hit
and run accident."
Already, this entry started off--
started to go into fantasy.
I asked a lot of questions.
I began to think-- just now it occurred
to me that maybe a lot of my poems
result from my having asked myself questions,
either on paper or just walking around.
And I guess I wanted to continue asking them.
So that's where the Sunday Dialogues came from,
if any of you read this poem in the book.
And in the poem, I really can't explain it too well,
because I got myself thoroughly confused.
It's an eight-part poem, which means that each little part is
a little island.
It's supposed to be taken as itself.
But the situation in the poem is a woman, I think,
a woman sitting in a bar overhearing two men talking,
kind of blurring in the poem between the dialogue
between the men and the dialogue between the woman and the man,
which is taking place probably in the woman's mind.
They're not literally having any interaction at all.
Probably interaction of sensibility.
I remember getting wonderfully confused
as I worked on this poem as to just what was going on.
And I decided that was all right.
So I will read you this and I'll read you the numbers
so you'll know when one part's over and another one begins.
Sunday Dialogues, one.
"Two men, one drains his glass, one
eyes a placid woman crossing unremarkable legs.
One says he only imagines his hands
on the sides of women half asleep
who slowly feel his damp skin.
One says, I tear off their clothes."
Two.
"The woman I have become crosses her legs and stares
at newsprint on a page a strand of hair,
her glass suddenly empty.
He tears off their clothes.
I cross my legs."
Three.
"He would tear off her clothes.
She stares out the window as if waiting to breathe.
His hips would move fast as a boy's.
She hears him explain an idea has
walls and floors below ground.
His hips would move faster than she remembers later."
Four.
"One says young girls imagine themselves
more real than their mothers who retire calmly
at night in flannel gowns."
Five.
"The other surrounds her as though each of his limbs
were a body."
Six.
"Or does he breach of her fingers gently?"
Seven.
"Surely she moves and forces him to dance.
Does he wave his arms and say, darling?
Do his hands close and open against his will?
Who removes the water and the broken glass?
At the next table, a woman crosses and recrosses her legs.
A stone on a chain hangs between the waitress's breath.
A single stone warm as a finger sinks and rises
as she hands him a glass."
I feel like reading you more cohesive poems suddenly.
I guess this hasn't happened very often,
but it's a kind of a neat thing I want to keep in mind.
Some of the things I've written or some of the things
that have most impressed me emotionally
have come out of friendships and have come out
of very close interactions, intense talking,
but also just an emotional openness to another person that
comes out of a certain kind of friendship.
And I have one friend, probably the first person
I ever had this kind of friendship with,
who, when she--
at one point, I realized when she was telling you
about herself, I would really be internalizing a sense of what
it felt like to be her.
It was kind of a neat feeling.
And I guess it's like reading or seeing a movie,
but it's more intense, because there's
a certain amount of affection involved and, therefore, more
empathy.
She told me about an image that she saw.
And it happened when she was driving through Europe
with her husband and small child and she was very, very tired.
And she was driving past a park where
a group of [? hydrocephalic ?] children
were being taken for a walk.
And they were all in a big group and they
had a nurse or a keeper and they were dressed very formally.
And it just seemed very odd to her.
But she saw it just driving and went on driving.
And the way she described the image,
it just made it very vivid.
And she also mentioned the frame of mind she was in,
which was a kind of extreme fatigue and depression,
the kind of thing you can get when you're traveling too long
and are taking care of people at the same time.
I don't remember any more of the context of the image,
but it did haunt her and she told me how it haunted her.
And I guess I must have taken it home
and it wanted to be in a poem.
It wanted to have a poem built around it.
So I made it into a situation.
I gave it a beginning and I gave it an end.
I wrote a sort of narrative poem.
But I was really getting into her point of view
in order to write it.
And when I showed her the poem later,
it turned out that a lot of the things I had made up
were pretty much true, literally true as well as emotionally
true.
And it just seemed like a wonderful kind of transference
in which the self gets out of the way, which
I think is a very good thing for the self to do in this writing,
and where I really did link up with her feeling,
with looking at things through her eyes.
So it was a nice experience for me, kind of a liberating thing.
This is called In Barcelona You Tried to Scream.
"You had spent the day looking at paintings.
The real park was too green, still dappled at twilight.
The crippled children sat too quietly.
Someone had dressed them in lace and gabardine,
like the antique figures you'd seen through a haze of fatigue.
You covered your daughter's eyes.
You stared at the children under the trees
who stared at nothing, their incurable lives.
Their deaths seemed to rise inside them like the sleep
of the newly born.
Their nurse gazed over the pond.
Your husband said, just drive.
And you held the wheel like a pair of shoulders.
Tonight, you dine in Paris.
Without turning, you know the street outside glitters,
that people speak cheerfully into the wind.
If you close your eyes, you can see the women's faces
floating like orchids.
Your husband offers you a light and you lean forward
in your fragile chair in the middle of Paris.
In an invisible France, people you'll never meet
are lighting lamps for their frightened children,
or driving too fast, or selling everything.
In Barcelona, you tried to scream.
In Paris, your husband offers you a light
and his hands carve themselves in one motion
behind your eyes."
This next poem is more about an experience
that really happened.
And one of the things that was funny about it
is that I wished it wasn't happening as it was happening,
which it had to do with overhearing somebody moaning
in an apartment across the way from mine.
And I couldn't tell if she was in ecstasy or being killed.
And I realized at that point that vicarious experience
is great as long as it's in your imagination.
It's a little bit uncomfortable when
you start having to deal with it more directly,
but I wrote about it anyway.
This is called Last Night, They Heard the Woman Upstairs.
"Last night, they heard the woman upstairs moaning.
They lay in bed.
And she did not stop, and she did not stop,
and she did not grow louder.
The husband saw her once, moon-faced and ample
on the stairs.
The wife did not move her hand along his thigh,
for hairs springing there.
For a moment, she pictured him not in the bed, not alive,
and a scream cracking like some withered thing from her lips.
Tonight, the husband is reading.
The wife bites into a peach.
The woman upstairs slammed the door.
The building takes back its silence, like breath.
Last night, they heard her moaning and they waited.
And they thought their skin was visible through the sheets
and the drawn shade.
And the husband said, she must make love slowly,
the way she climbs the stairs."
Another thing that I felt comfortable
with for a long time is I don't know
how to talk about recent poems.
But at least while I'm in this book,
I can give you some writerly tidbits.
I know that, in many cases, it helps me to feel
that I'm telling a story.
The task for me is always taking images,
which are my way of translating feelings, and then trying
to find a way to organize them.
And it's usually either picking a voice,
or stumbling across a voice, or letting one evolve,
or finding some kind of chronology or deliberate
destruction of chronology.
In other words, using the narrative
trajectory in some way for organizing the images.
And very often, just a simple telling
of a story and sketching of a scene
has been a good way out for me.
This next poem makes use of that.
Also, while I was working on it, I
found a quote that seemed to express the emotion that I
was trying to make concrete.
So I stuck it in as an epigram and that is "she felt free,
but there was nothing she could do about it."
That's Peter Handke's story about his mother
called A Sorrow Beyond Dreams.
It's a wonderful story.
And I stole half the title.
I just kept the beyond dreams part.
"She calls on herself.
She loosens her hair before the woman
in the mirror who smiles as a man would
smile at such long hair.
She picks up a shell that seems to pull the walls of the room
toward itself, like a woman carrying a child.
She touches it as she might touch
every part of the man's body.
At dusk, she eats as though someone else is eating,
as though the man has poured the wine
and she has brought them into a safe hunger.
And when the man arrived, looking
for someone slender, someone smelling of petals, someone
whose hands might follow the curve of his great sadness,
he finds strands of long hair in the brush, long dresses
in the closet, himself in the mirror with a young girl
who keeps rising to touch books and small objects, who
keeps looking out the window as if someone were waiting."
I'm going to move over to some new poems now.
I feel these are strange to me still to read, even though some
of them aren't that new, because I think
they are, in various ways, I'm trying
to deal more directly with my own feelings
or go backwards and fish things out that really are mine
and that I'm conscious of as being mine.
And I don't know if that's what happens when you get older
or when you get self-indulgent.
I don't know what it means, except that I
think it's good to take risks.
And I guess I was very afraid to risk being sentimental,
because, like you, I was very highly trained
by a lot of workshops.
And there were certain things I just felt were real no no's.
And I think these are the things I'm
trying to [INAUDIBLE] I'm just try
to see to what degree I can let them into my poems
without self-destructing.
To various degrees, you'll see this in these poems.
I don't know.
Now that I've said all that, maybe you
should just forget it and listen to the poem.
I can't be too articulate about the recent past.
This poem was an attempt to do something
that I've enjoyed giving out as an assignment, which
is to take an experience that you had as a child.
I'm going along the theory that children perceive very strongly
and lodge things in their memories
and are very cognizant of certain things that
are going on around them before they can talk,
before they can really understand language completely,
and before they can use language.
Nevertheless, they're functioning
and they're storing memories.
Or maybe they're even thinking in language,
but they're not using it.
I don't know.
But what happens when you have things you want to express
and you're too small to do it?
I decided to ask my students and I also asked myself,
to try to put words or try to find images
to [AUDIO OUT] something that maybe you were never
able to talk about when it happened.
And this poem is about a phenomenon
that I was never able to explain to my parents.
It had to do with being afraid of the dark,
but there was nothing I could name.
There was no monster, no dream.
There's nothing about the dark itself
that really frightened me.
But it had something to do with the fact
that when the room was dark, I could still see pictures
in front of my eyes.
Somebody had told me if I wanted not to be bored in the dark--
somehow, I learned that I could make myself see pictures.
And it wasn't that nice.
I would be able to see something.
I wouldn't have to lie down in the dark being
bored and feeling deserted.
But I learned that once I got the pictures going,
I couldn't make them go away.
And so I'd yell for my father, but I
didn't know what to say to him.
I must have been able to talk.
I must have been able to understand language.
But I never could tell him why I was so terrified, because it
simply had to do with something in my own head that seemed
to be a visual phenomenon.
And once I evoked it, I couldn't make it stop.
It was like having to hear music that won't go away.
Now I'm not sure if that's accurate.
And I don't even know if the poem
deals with that very directly.
But that's what started the poem.
I decided I wanted to try to re-evoke the situation, which
meant making things up.
The father in this poem is a lot more articulate and poetic
than my father, who's an engineer-- was.
He helped me a lot, but he didn't say all these things
about the dark.
So I took a lot of poetic license here.
This is called Private Act.
"My father promised as he shut my room dark night was
the sun's eye blinking.
I promised I wouldn't chew paper again or leave the damp wads
like amulets under the bed.
I shut my eyes.
The guests raised their drinks and told
stories downstairs, laughing in their bracelets, their rings
of smoke.
Their strange breath bloomed with attention.
I opened my eyes, but the paisley sofa print rose still,
a copper wave that filled and kept
filling my eye's black room.
I crept to the stairs where light floated up.
And sometimes, a string of words I would wear for the night.
He tucked me in again.
He promised me dark as a pair of arms,
rocking water, a blanket on my thighs.
The paper tasted salty, the taste of my first lie.
Then I crept among scented furs on the bed
no one made my parents sleep in.
No, I slept all night in the bed where
I belonged while turquoise threads branched like bits
of sky through my mother's water-colored gown
and morning came slow, gray through every window at once."
I've lived in El Paso for three years.
And from the very beginning, I was struck by the Southwest.
It has a kind of drama, physical drama, especially sunsets,
that it's just so overwhelming.
I've really gotten involved in it.
And I have never really wanted to write about it.
Although, I have thought about it a lot.
But suddenly, this fall, I found myself
wanting to deal with the landscape.
And it's really hard to write description.
You feel like you're writing a greeting card or something.
It's when you try to describe something that's
blatantly beautiful and everybody knows about
and see pictures of.
And I hope I'm going to try more of this,
because what was interesting is I had to find-- well,
I guess you always do.
If you're going to talk about something,
you have to find another thing you're going
to talk about at the same time.
And somehow, by just juxtaposing those, things you can add depth
to the thing you thought you wanted to talk about
and you can also trick yourself in talking
about something else.
I think that's helped me a lot.
I'm not sure about that, but I'll just
hand it out as a possibility.
And that certainly helped me, because you can't just
write description.
Any fiction writer knows you can't just write description.
You have to break it up.
This is called Rain in the Desert.
"It leaves this city suddenly porous,
all windows thrown open.
Whatever grows out there in the sand closes in now,
breathing like the gray horse that once detached himself
at dusk from the dark end of a pasture.
I'd thought he was a shed or a pile of birch.
And I want to laugh again having been right this time all day
as my temples closed over grievance,
fat around the heart, then flared.
I wanted sudden stones across old water,
a vein of pure logic, someone to grab my hands.
Now the sun offers the last of itself.
A bruised light, horizon has pulled the sky apart.
And the beaten streets, dark rivers
shine as though through tears.
Now the houses have disappeared, leaving
their windows full of land, leaving these low hills resting
under lamps."
One thing that was happening when I wrote that--
I often find that after I'm through with a poem
or at least through with one writing of it,
I have a very large physical picture of the whole situation.
The whole room has been furnished,
even though I'm only writing about what's
happening on the sofa, that kind of thing.
And I know that while writing this poem,
I just kept retracing the sense of how--
well, sometimes, sunsets and sometimes
with weather in the desert, at least in El Paso,
there's a lot of mountain ranges to look at all the time.
But when the weather changes there,
you often feel that you're in two times of day at once.
It can be night over here and you can still
see sun over there.
[INAUDIBLE] over here and you can see clear weather
over there.
And I just had never seen that before.
So I really had the sense of dual time.
And I don't know if that's in the poem or not,
but it was it's something I'll never forget,
because I had to live with that--
I did live with that vision for a while.
[INAUDIBLE]
I'm going to read this poem that was on the little reading
sheet, the one called Flash Flood.
One of the things I wanted to mention about it,
there's an image at the end about a child staring
from his mother's lap.
And I got that image from the photograph of Transtromer
in Ironwood.
We were talking about that earlier.
There's this wonderful picture of Transtromer
and his wife and his first child.
And they just are looking directly
out at the audience at the camera.
And that child just looks so sure of himself.
He just looks like he can handle anything-- she.
And this poem started out with an attempt
to write about feelings clustered around
how, when you're grown up, you still
have this [AUDIO OUT] that you really haven't come very far.
Your parents still have a sort of awful hold on you,
even though it only comes up in subtle situations, the kind
of vulnerability that an adult feels, I think,
when their child self comes out.
And while I was working on the poem,
I was also teaching Transtromer and I
was using that issue of Ironwood for my class.
And I just found myself looking in that picture again and again
and thinking, this kid looks like they'll never
have this problem.
And so that kid came into the poem.
I wouldn't say this, because I'm assuming most of you've
seen the poem before, so I'm not ruining it
by where that image came from, because, in a way,
it doesn't matter.
I also did for this poem--
I spliced two things.
I made up phone conversations that never took place verbatim,
but there is a mood to the phone conversation
that is autobiographical.
And there's also the fact that, one night when
I was living in Kansas City, we had a terrible flood
that made national news.
And it was happening two blocks from my house.
And I didn't realize it was happening
down there until people started calling me up long distance
and saying, are you all right?
You're killed all over the place where you live.
And I was really shocked that I had been so unaware.
All I could hear was the rain, deafening rain.
So I spliced the two things together.
I ended up splicing them together.
I thought I was going to try to do a lot more ambitious things,
but I had to give up.
Flash Flood.
"My parents call to say, are you all right?
You shouldn't be alone.
We can't sleep.
Again, I tell them, I live on a hill.
I tell them, it's only rain beating
like robbers at the window.
They tell me, we've never liked you living alone.
When are you coming home?
And now I remember all the beaus who
borrowed money, the bath I once left running,
the ceiling cracking under where I should have been,
the tantrums, the anniversaries, the notes of thanks.
And now, the President rises from an [AUDIO OUT] meal
where food lies on his plate like an abandoned
village, prodded and intact.
I rise to fix a sandwich.
I walk softly for the neighbors downstairs
while, somewhere at sea, in a wallet warmed by some sailor's
hip, a child stares boldly in his mother's lap
as though the camera were an eye just opening the world to him."
I think I'll read you a fairly long poem in the sense
that it's in three sections, each of which
is about as long as some of the poems I've been reading.
This is really a case that helped
me learn how to superimpose different things on each other
in order to deal with something.
It started out as a poem trying to use a lot of imagery that
had to do with being divorce.
And I've got some interesting images.
But finally, that's one of those subjects,
it's like writing about love or autumn.
You write about divorce, it's pretty hard
to do it with any kind of originality.
It's hard to do it without being self-indulgent.
There's a certain kind of-- a lot of distance
you have to get.
And I didn't know what to do with the images
for a long time, but I ended up finding two things helped.
The one thing, I ended up wanting
to use a lot of images that had to do
with reading The Moviegoer, which is probably
my favorite novel.
And it's probably made a big impression on me
in ways I can't describe at the moment.
But you're going to hear in the poem
some references to that novel.
It's by Walker Percy.
It takes place in Louisiana.
In the middle section of the poem,
there's an italicized section, which
simply refers to the book.
And that's why I just want to explain what's going on.
If you were reading a poem, you would see the italics
and you would get the message that the voice is changing.
Another thing that helped me was to cast this poem in the point
of view of someone who's jogging,
because there's something about the circular flow of thought
that gets going when you run.
You think about something, your mind wanders, it comes back,
it wanders.
And I found that movement was really what I needed.
And that accommodated the divorce imagery,
and it accommodated The Moviegoer,
and it accommodated a narrative line.
I wasn't conscious of all this while I was working on it.
The poem got dismantled many, many times.
But it was a nice arrival, finally.
And it ended up being in three parts
and it ended up having a lot of italics in it
and being rather complex.
But I think I've kind of tied all the strands for you enough.
This is called Running.
One.
"Lately, my neighbor wheezes pounding dough,
her forearm glazed with sweat and flour.
At your age, my mother writes, I wanted babies.
I got pregnant each time one of you learned to walk.
I circle the block again and again
until I run outside my body.
This time last year, my husband's
stalking of the other woman who slept poorly inside him.
She promised in another town to give him up.
All night, she tossed and tried to speak
until he spoke of his father, who drank himself
into the cracked well of his voice and never touched bottom.
She made him wake, sweating and brooding
in the closed room of his departure,
while I ran myself past my neighbor's lawn and loaves,
plump and settling in their heat,
to an early shape of myself."
Two.
"I'd forgotten whose apartment stretched like a tunnel,
shapeless and dark, the way my good dress hung too large,
a formal body outside my body.
The other men drifted alike behind their drink,
while he stood in one place and spoke
to me of The Moviegoer, which spoke,
he said, to his very soul.
Sometimes, I run in Louisiana where I've never been,
where the hero saw an egret gather itself over swamp mist
and settle in a single oak that rose to meet it.
Later, he married his cousin, whose
agile mind wandered, glittering at the family
table, the dense mahogany.
The Black butler wheezed as he passed butter beans.
She couldn't sleep, she said, without pills.
Sometimes, she slept for two days.
She promised she could be like anyone
if he would tell her each morning how to pass that day.
That night, my skin held me like liquid glass.
I wanted to slip my hand beneath his elbow to dance,
to see the other women naked inside their clothes."
Three.
"Every morning, I run through pollen, late summer haze,
or rain.
My husband is an illness I had in another country.
The day he left again and again, he said none of it
was my fault. I circle the block, pump and sweat,
until I run outside my body.
My ribs ached.
He ran his hands gently over them.
Inside my running, I write to him,
breaking the silence we keep for his new wife.
I saw the sun disappear into mist as it reached the horizon.
I saw an egret airborne, circling all this time.
The morning bus gathers husbands and children
and leaves for a moment a soft rope of exhaust.
I draw breath over breath as the children
must breathe in their sleep.
My neighbor waves from her doorway,
watches my easy stride.
Your waist, she says wistfully, fits
the dress I wore as a bride."
This next poem is kind of bitchy.
I think it's a persona poem.
I sure hope it's a persona poem.
It sounds like Dorothy Parker wrote it.
It's fun to read, because it's in dialogue.
And, for me, it was a made up situation.
Although, it's probably going to come back to haunt me
when I become salty old dame.
This is called Loyalty.
"Our eyes meet over other couples' shoulders.
And another love song launches its vows.
His body lists in my direction, but not, I
assure myself, without grace.
I offer my ringless hand.
Shall we dance?
On his waist, my hand meets the roll
of flesh, the wife who let her body go.
I remind myself there's no such thing as a badly made man.
Your eyes, he says.
And my glasses slip into their silk purse.
His chin settles into my neck.
The pearls, I say, were a gift from the man I didn't marry.
Tall, dark, and riddled with beauty,
he spent my ardor to please pressing
any knees under glass tables.
This one breathes in my air with the two step.
I rise to my toes to follow on air.
Oh, I learned to calm on that phone
while a stranger breathes hard words of love.
Now my life is about to change.
He tells me his mistress, all legs and caramel skin,
just left for the coast.
We dance.
We drink.
We doze on each other's shoulders.
We stare at stars, who stay in their dark,
and gather ourselves towards mourning, the rough ride out
of our clothes."
I hope I'm going to write a lot of dancing poems.
I really feel kind of fascinated with that whole thing.
I have another one to read you, which is written way
after the first one.
But I have a sense that it's a vein
that I want to keep following.
And this one is quite direct, also.
The American Deaf Dance Company came to El Paso last fall.
And in addition to being moved by the beautiful dancing, which
I would have been in any event, I
think one of the things I think about dancers when
I watch them perform is the sense they must be transformed
by what they're doing out there, that
how can they just get off the stage
with a beautiful, perfect body and be ordinary?
Do they drink Cokes?
Do they eat french fries?
I can't imagine it they just look so--
they're almost mythologizing themselves on stage.
And maybe that's one of the things
I just admire so much about it.
And I kind of like that illusion.
When I was watching the American Deaf Dance Company,
there was no music.
It was just movements.
And I found that fantasy held up better,
because, in a way, when they were finished dancing,
they wouldn't go off stage and start gossiping, or giggling,
or making silly noises, that they would still somehow
be left in that world that they had created,
which is probably not true.
When you watch them do their signing,
that's another kind of dancing.
And it's a very articulate thing.
But I kept the fantasy that what they were doing on stage,
they would keep close to them longer,
because [AUDIO OUT] that in a way
they were protected from mundane life.
And it was that impression that made me write this poem.
I really don't think I'm giving the poem away by saying it.
But I enjoyed my fantasy so much and I just
thought I'd hand it out.
This is called The American Deaf Dance Company: Whistlestop.
Middle section is in italics.
I guess, I want you to think of that as flashbacks.
I don't know how to read flashbacks yet.
"They mark stress as a sting of landing.
Swift kiss, another leap apart.
I lean in my feet missing you.
My knees crack.
Our old dispute loosens its whims,
the words curled on themselves and the trip
to a movie etched for good.
Some couples smoked hurriedly, locking their cars.
Later, we held the plot like ice in our mouths,
walked home melting it down while street lights [AUDIO OUT]
ahead.
Why did we never walk barefoot through that house?
Bleached denim sweeps their thighs, their breath
the only other sound.
Their eyes never leave the space they
weave as they leave the ground.
And I clap my hands high so they'll see.
She falls again into his sure arms."
This next poem--
I find myself when I teach writing telling people
not to try to write too directly about things that consume them
emotionally, because it's usually a pretty bad way
to begin writing a poem.
I've always advocated for myself and for students finding
an area where you are ignorant and fascinated,
and then just going in there and exploring,
and using your writing as a method of exploration.
It sounds wonderful and it does work.
But this poem wanted very much to be about something.
It was probably the first time I ever allowed myself
to use an emotion and just keep working, and working,
and working at it until I got something out of it.
And it came from the experience of having
a close friend of mine call me at 5:00 in the morning
one morning and say, would you mind coming over?
I've been raped and I think I need some help, which
is very calm, but the message was just like a bombshell,
like the ringing of the telephone itself.
And as it turned out, she wasn't damaged unduly by any of it
beyond the event itself.
And she was treated well by the police
and she was treated well by the hospitals.
And everything came out reasonably all right.
But there were shockwaves from just the whole experience
of knowing someone and of being awakened into that so suddenly.
And afterwards, I found that for the first time in my life
I was afraid, as though it had happened to me.
I was suddenly seen seeing the world
through the same sense of vulnerability
as though I had had that happen.
And up until then, it had [AUDIO OUT] home.
I was indignant about it as a phenomenon,
but I had never been hurt by it.
And I still haven't been directly hurt by it.
But after this happened to a friend,
it was something that became part of my emotional makeup
for a while.
It was also during a period where
I was very aware of the flip side: that there's
great tenderness and there's great violence
between men and women.
And in addition to reacting to the rape,
I also just found myself thinking
about that dual nature.
So I tried dealing with all those things in this poem.
And I think the main effort I had writing it--
I called it The Rapist.
And I have never--
I've always advocated understatement.
So to have anything with a working title of The Rapist,
I felt constantly that I was breaking my own rule.
And I found that most of the work I had to do was cutting.
Finally, when I had everything down that I thought I needed,
I had to just slash, and slash, and slash,
because the temptation, of course,
was to get melodramatic.
So I ended up with four short sections, each of which
is separated by an asterisk.
So I really need a pause to be a little stronger
than a stanza break.
The second one is in italics, because I [AUDIO OUT]
flashback.
The Rapist.
"You do not know how long he sat by the bed,
moving the hidden parts of your body
to another mattress in his head.
You never saw his face.
Later, police found bits of the kitchen window
cracked with damp soil through every room.
Your first lover was a large man, soft from years of longing
for extraordinary women and had small hands.
His skin burned easily in the sun.
That first night, pleased and desperate,
he licked parts of your body you'd never seen.
Then shuddered, settled and drifted in your arms.
You were too pleased to sleep.
You arranged yourself over your sore parts.
All night, his eyes moved under soft, blue lids
as though seeking the other woman he leaves asleep.
Awake, you would ease him into daylight.
The doctor found hairs inside your body.
He found them with tweezers and a pinpoint of light.
The police, he said, will keep them for evidence.
You keep telling yourself he was not a large man.
In each hot bath, his body loosens from yours like paint.
Night after night, your breaths are weightless in the water.
Neither plants nor animals are laced with stubborn blue veins.
All night, your eyes move under dark lids
as though seeking a familiar woman inside yourself."
I want to try a couple of poems on you.
And this is always risky.
There are two that I'm in doubt about.
The first one is fun.
It won't be taxing.
And, in fact, what's wrong with it might just
be that it's too easy.
So I hope you enjoy it.
But I also would welcome suggestions.
You're all trained in criticism and I
could use it if you have it.
I also feel that reading poems that aren't finished
isn't necessarily an imposition on people,
as they vanish right away.
But both of these poems I'm sort of trying out on you
speculatively.
And this first one just might be too neat, but it's fun to read.
It's called Domestic Wine.
"My friends are quitting smoking,
being quoted on the news.
Fumbling for eyes [AUDIO OUT] 2:00 AM,
watching every foreign film.
Each plans to leave town soon.
Each is the hero of a story that begins,
I've never told this to anyone.
My friends at dawn in their running shoes.
My friends after dark in their good skin and turquoise.
My friends who will never marry again.
My friends for whom I open late at night
into an eye that listens.
Their rings catch the light.
Their cheekbones and brows surface
like carving over tables they've stripped and waxed and waxed
again.
Even the air takes shape between their hands as each,
like a bandit, plots the perfect departure.
My friends who sleep, pretending themselves
held by someone they've never met.
My friends saying, my children.
My friends falling wearily in love over glasses of wine.
One by one, they tell me, finally, I know myself."
I stumbled there, because, at the last minute,
I switched lines around.
I've been doing first aid on these all day
so I can try to read them.
This next one may still be notes.
I don't know.
There's a lot of images that I've
been trying to organize that have to do with what it feels
like to move, to move away.
And I start out with a very minimal poem and I expanded it
and now I'm trying to cut it back down.
And fairly recently, I decided to divide into short sections.
So I just want to hear what it sounds like.
I don't know if this is the form it's going to take.
And I want to keep a kind of fragmentary feeling to it,
but I might be too fragmentary still.
Moving.
"Every night, these walls seem to twitch once and settle
as the body gives in to sleep.
A painting leans from its nail.
And every morning, you rub the strange stiffness
from your eyes, the corners of your mouth.
Soon, the first cracks will surface like bits of rope
where a child's boat rests underwater, letting go."
Two.
"Every morning, you wake out of breath.
Soon, you will leave with water to last,
another walk through a town grown blank
with doors and sunlight slammed into glass.
Keep breathing.
Think of the eye as sealed, a bay fed by spring."
Three.
"Every summer, people you love go back and get older
with or without you.
At night, the surface, all glass over moon and [AUDIO OUT]
is as warm as your hand.
All winter, no one is around.
The reeds wave and wave under water, its steady wind."
Four.
"These windows, this seared roof,
these yards that shrink every year in their sparse,
discolored greens.
Soon, you will wonder if you lived here at all.
Every morning, you wake out of breath.
For a while, let your voice go wrong against the ribs,
a slow route hugging the dark."
I'm going to finish up with one poem out of Natural Histories
that I just like.
This poem started out with an image, just a single image
that I ended growing a poem around.
And the image came from standing around, waiting
to register my car in the state of Missouri, one January day.
It was altogether a depressing experience
and a depressing day.
And there was a long line and the building
that we were in was lit by fluorescent lights.
And people's boots were dribbling all over the place
and it was just icky.
And the woman waiting on everyone was--
it was real busy and she was dressed
for action in a pantsuit.
And she had short, brown hair and was medium--
some kind of indeterminate age.
And she must have been wearing oxfords.
I didn't see her feet, but the whole image
was that she probably was wearing oxfords.
And there's nothing attractive in the room
it was all set up for business and very routine business.
And it was depressing.
But she was wearing a pair of-- it
really look like antique cameo earrings.
I wasn't standing all that close to her.
But the earrings were the one decorative thing in the room
and they just struck me.
And somehow, this poem came out of that image.
And it's called Why There Are Children.
"From inside, every woman lights the candles.
This is the woman sons look for when they leave their wives.
Daughters become wives thinking they
travel backwards to the dresser covered with lace.
The hairpins still scattered there and the cameo earrings.
The same gnarled tree darkens the bedroom window.
The hair coiled in a locket conceals
the hands of men and children.
When a woman shivers on the porch, perhaps, at dusk,
it is the other wanting a shawl.
When a woman in her middle years rises and dresses for work,
the other reaches for the cameos,
remembering a great love and herself on the brink of it."
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]