Thank you.
Yeah?
Thank you.
You all have a legendary reputation as a poetry audience.
And so I'm going to--
I'm going to say a couple of things.
I wrote this book in argument with a number of books of poems,
and even with my own predilections as a writer.
I wanted to write a book of poems that was more of a roller
coaster than a smooth ride.
I wanted to write a book of poems
that wasn't all in one emotional key
even if that key was high and interesting.
And so this-- what I'm about to read to you tonight
is written in a number of different voices.
They are meant to conflict, undercut one another,
and also, you can think of them as different characters speaking
during a play.
So that I'm going to try and be as personable as I can right
now, because at a certain point, I'm going to drop out
and simply not talk any more as myself.
The book opens in a small town in Nevada,
and one of the undercurrents of the book is issue of money,
and what it meant to a state like Nevada
when the military industrial complex moved in
with all its glittering technology and promise of wealth
and began to test the atomic bomb near Las Vegas,
and what that meant for a number of small mining towns
which had essentially been sold a bill of goods
about how this was going to pour wealth into the state.
Some of the voices that I'm going to read tonight
are in prose.
And the first piece that I'm going to read
is not about fiction in the sense of a particular genre.
It's about the irresistible pull that certain models of narrative
have, whether they're in fiction or poetry,
if you're an American writer.
"Why I Am A Poet."
"Jill's a good kid who's had some tough luck,
but that's another story.
Anyway, she says, go ahead, tell about it,
because nobody ever gets the woman's point of view.
We are sitting at the blue light where Carl has just built
us a couple of solid highballs.
He's OK, Carl is, if you don't count
as Roman hands and Russian fingers,
but then again, that should be the only trouble
we have in this life.
I don't know.
I'm looking out the window, and it's Friday.
The smell of fish from Tib's Hash House
is so strong you could build a garage on it.
Maybe Jill's right.
She's just a kid, but she's been around.
She knows whats what.
So we are at the blue light just like now, I tell Jill,
when he comes in, and the first thing I notice is his hair,
which has been vitalised into submission, but honey,
it won't work, and it gives him a kind of rumpled
your-boudoir-or-mine look.
I noticed that before I noticed his face, it was kind of odd
thinking back on it.
Maybe it was just the highballs doing the looking.
But anyway, then I see his face, and I'm telling you,
I'm telling Jill, this is a masterpiece of a face.
And then again, and this is the god's own truth,
I am tired of beauty.
Really, I know, given all that happened,
this must sound kind of funny, but it made me tired
just to look at him.
That's how beautiful he was and how much he spelled
T-R-O-U-B-L-E. So I threw him back.
I mean, I didn't say it.
I say to Jill with my mouth, but I said it
with my eyes and my shoulders.
I said it with my heart.
I said, honey, I'm throwing you back.
And looking back, that was the worst,
I mean, the worst thing bar none that I
could have done because it drew him the way shit draws flies.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, he didn't say it.
He didn't walk over and say, hello, girls.
Hey, you with a dark hair, you're indifference draws me
the way shit draws flies, but he said it with his eyes,
and then he smiled.
And that smile was a gas station on a dark night
and as wearying as all the rest of it.
I am many things, but dumb is not one of them
and here is where I say to Jill, I just can't go on.
I mean, how we get from the smile into the room,
how it all happens, and what all happens just bores me.
I am a kind of a conceptual storyteller.
In fact, I'm kind of a conceptual liver.
I prefer the cookbook to the actual meal.
Feeling bores me to tears.
That's why I write poetry.
You just give the instructions and say, reader,
you go on from here.
And what I like about poetry is its readers
because those are giving people.
I mean, those are people you can trust to get the job done.
They pull their own weight.
If I had to have someone at my back in a dark alley,
I'd want it to be a poetry reader.
They're not like some people who maybe do it right
if you say put this foot down, and now
put that one in front of the other, button your coat,
wipe your nose.
So I really do it for the readers who work hard,
and I feel deserve something better
than they're used to getting.
I do it for the working stiff.
And I guess I write the kinds of things I like to read.
I write for people like myself who
are just tired of the trickle down theory where someone spends
ages and pages on some fat book where everything, including
the goddamn draperies, which happened to be burnt orange,
are described and further, and I mean further,
are a goddamn metaphor for something.
And the whole boggy waste trickles down
to the reader in the form of a little fart of feeling.
God, I hate prose.
I think the average reader likes ideas.
A sentence, unlike a line, is not a station on the cross.
I said this to Mark Strand.
I said I could not stand to write prose.
I said I could not stand to have to write things
like the draperies were burnt orange and the carpet was brown.
And he said, you could do it.
You could do it if that's all you
did, if that was the very beginning and very
end of your novel.
So please, I say to Jill, don't ask me
for the little trail of breadcrumbs
to get you from the smile to the bedroom and from the bedroom
to the death at the end.
Although you can ask me a lot about death.
That's all I like.
The very beginning, and the very end.
I haven't got the stomach for the rest of it.
I don't think many people do.
But like me, they're either too afraid
or too polite to say so that's why
the movies are such a disaster.
Now there's a form of popular culture
that doesn't have a clue.
Movies should be five minutes long.
You should go in, see a couple of shots,
maybe a room with orange draperies and a rug,
a voiceover would say, I'm having a hard time
getting Raoul the protagonist, from the hotel
room into the elevator and bang, that's the end.
The lights come on.
Everybody walks out full of sympathy,
because this is a shared experience.
[LAUGHTER]
Everybody in that theater knows how hard
it is to get Raoul from the hotel room into the elevator.
Everyone has had to do boring, dogged work.
Everyone has lived a life that seems
to inflict upon every momentary vividness, the smears
and fingerings and pawings of plot and feeling.
Everybody has lived under this oppression.
In other words, everyone has had to eat shit day after day,
endless meals they didn't want, those dark half gelatinous lakes
of gravy that lay on the plate like an ugly rug,
and the wrinkled clump of reddish orange roast beef
that looks like it was dropped onto your plate
from a great height.
God, what a horror, getting Raoul into the elevator.
[LAUGHTER]
That's why I like poetry, honey.
You could starve to death on what you get from poetry."
[APPLAUSE]
"The Beginning, Ely, Nevada."
Can you hear me--