This really has been a very partnered literary life,
starting from their years together at Drake University,
so there's going to be a lot of overlap in this introduction.
It's kind of a wonderful convergence.
William Olsen also received an MFA
from the University of Arizona, he, in 1979,
and a PhD from the University of Houston in 1988.
His awards include an NEA Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize,
the University of Missouri Press Breakthrough
Award, the Nation Discovery Award, and two Academy
of American Poets awards.
He too teaches at Western Michigan University.
His books are Vision of a Storm Cloud published
in 1996 by Triquarterly, and The Hand of God
and a Few Bright Flowers published by the Illinois
Press in 1988, selected by David Wagoner for the National Poetry
Series, and Flight, a limited edition chapbook published
by San Pedro Press.
David Wagoner said of Olsen's poems,
they are records of Olsen's own sense of surprise
at the manifold wonders in a private world
whose links to a public world he is nearly always
in the process of discovering.
His capacity for making the figurative leap
is indeed wonderful, and I think oddly
consoling as in such felicitous figures
as when the century has its final say,
may the tiny motels of our voices pray
or what good can our small talk do, America, all our neighbors
homeless in their feelings?
Robert Duncan once said that modern man has chickened out
on God.
Olsen has taken up the task of seeking
a language for that loss, and his poems
come into a kind of troubled faith
that is filled with both grievance and gratitude.
Please welcome William Olsen.
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE] Well, it's sure nice to be here
and a little intimidating.
It's OK.
I'll read a few poems from this manuscript in progress.
It's a great euphemism.
And a [INAUDIBLE].
The first-- the first poem is a first death poem,
and the first death in our household was a cat.
"Mercy."
"Our dying cat trying to balance on the level stainless steel
isn't able.
She's trying not to fall inside the noise.
For 15 years, her blood is made.
Inescapable face.
Our pet grief falls.
The heaviest of the little of it.
Left foreleg shaved to milk blue and none of the time
does the insufferable poison mercy seem finished.
It always comes back at the speed of light.
It's always pretty much the same,
for the dead bodies of our living day sit up in the fire.
Funny enough, I'm talking about friends too.
The heart so old it almost outlives shame, pulls back.
And yet, with a growing ease to add to the truth
that we always come out to another world,
its sun goes down without any shivering resistance,
as it always has.
The transitory that survives us seems
too austere to love sometimes but has exactly our personality.
Each star sinks the tip of a needle into night."
I spent a year working in a meatpacking plant
my father actually helped to design,
and I've written about it a little bit.
Still trying to find my way out of it, I suspect.
Holub has a poem about a slaughterhouse that
has a line in it that goes something like,
God is in each detail.
That's a somewhat disconcerting proposition.
"The Human Heart."
"There are concealments so deep that
to survive them is to be no longer ourselves,
but that is another story, almost.
We could walk to our cars, but we could not
retrieve every last singed hair that
calls our names in spite of us.
From the parking lot of the factory,
some nights, clouds looked like an X rayed heart, vaporous,
half heartedly material.
Oh, heart of sorrows, I take it back.
You were everywhere.
You were there.
All I can do is have you engine me
back to all the squat mushers of the feed pens fattened on fodder
and all the lesser mayhems of you, my heart,
grumbled like strikebreakers.
My eye usurious for blood and guts and travel.
My endless journey into endless body and only the midnight
whistle blaring.
Then it was morning and back inside the blood, though
who had left?
Then a matter of standing in the loading dock
while behind in the hide cellar slag heaps of entrails
seemed to warrant some design and salt in piles
high as sand dunes corroded the shovels
and ate the canvas gloves.
Out of the disinfected factory, I walked back
into the night, my dolorosa.
One of your pigs had fallen from a truck
to be left there on the road for the brother crows to take back.
There seemed no way out of the body, but farther into it.
A pig had fallen out of a loading truck left
to spill its guts on tar for days on end
and be a text for the donnish crows that instructed its rib
cage to open and its skull to roll back its eyes.
The steam rising from its snout hurled
pity right out of the picture.
These black shawls of mourning.
Out of the corpse came mourning, out of the eater
came forth meat, out of the meat came forth
those theorists, the maggots awake, dreaming in it, over it,
gorging on it, grieving in and out of its skull,
soaring on glorious grief.
Someone somewhere in the hide cellar
kept a radio on so someone else could be
singing some [INAUDIBLE] song.
That dime store radio and that dime store moonlight
seemed cheap enough to afford some sentiment, wholly or not.
And poetry likes to think it somehow better than nothing
at all because nobody died there.
As for all the lesser mayhems, no one was there,
someone was there, and there was only the cyclonic pull down
the floor drain back into the heart."
Yeah.
Sorry to do this to you.
We spent a month in London on our sabbatical in Cornwall,
and the only thing I could think to write about was--
of all the great grandeurs, culture in London
was this fly I saw in my shirt sleeve.
I think the first line, I figured this out,
I was reading this today, came from that little Blake song
from one of the Songs of Innocence.
It goes something like, love is life, and life is breath,
and the want of life is death.
Then am I a happy fly if I live, or if I die.
It's fun to include those things in a poetry reading
because then as a reader, you have
something to look forward to.
[LAUGHTER]
"To a Fly."
"Somewhere between love and death,
I find sunshine ripped from the sun, children enjoying the day.
On my shirt sleeve, a fly all eyes for a face.
Face, don't [INAUDIBLE] I'm fretting stupidly
at the taken cab.
Leave me in the dark, squinting in the rain
to come steady and hard to take every direction too far then
stop abruptly without warning.
And sunlight, not strictly alive, bear down,
light ripped and stripped of sickness and of health.
Light that doesn't smile and doesn't read, bear down on punks
and colourist punters and pigeons.
As for the doxies, they will always be with us.
Night wraps each streetlight in a shawl of olives.
Life is so scrutable, so scrutable, futile, frugal fires,
frugal psychologies, frugal cities.
You who moonlight and moonwalk on the human self
and land on the baby's brow or break up the first kiss.
You who require no grip on passing things,
you have your littlest voice, and that voice sings."
I guess, you know, this should come with a caveat,
don't try this at home or something.
All right.
When I was writing this poem, I was
reading not a very good novel in my mind, but a--
but an interesting one, Pynchon's Vineland.
It was really the first thing I'd
read that brought a kind of clear headedness
to the drug wars, and it gave me the--
gave me that-- ah, led to this poem, basically.
[LAUGHTER]
What else do I need to tell you about this?
There's an allusion to the Egyptian Book of the Dead--
there's a wonderful passage in the Egyptian Book
of the Dead called a negative confession,
and unlike our Catholic confession
where you make a gateway into heaven
by confessing all your sins in a very shapely way, basically,
what the negative confession does is catalog all those things
you were good enough not to do in your life.
[LAUGHTER]
That had tremendous appeal to me.
Yeah, I guess, you know, '70s, you know, LSD.
My experience of-- basically, was,
you know, you sit in a room with a few people,
you become vast and furious friends,
and then you never see them again.
[LAUGHTER]
"Negative Confession."
I razor split three hits of emerald pyramid for five of us
and through a hairline crack in the dusk,
pure space had broken through with everything
we ever meant to be tinkering the fire pond crimson.
One afterlife, and the next seeping away, even the one
called shame.
Phantasmal, unremembering, we all
tried to act as if everything were normal
while the windowed end of the world began again.
A few last blackbirds thrown across the cornfields
like something torn from Earth beyond our quiet,
and the skeletal sycamores into the orphanage called twilight.
That October sunset looked us all easy in the eyes
and told us we would never die except to dread and wonder.
20 years later, if telling resurrects,
then listen, oh, my heart, for we did not
want a peaceful afterlife.
In the Egyptian Book of the Dead,
at judgment, the heart is placed on a brass balance
and weighed against the feather of truth.
This is when, if you are lucky, your heart refuses
to testify against itself.
You never asked your servants to work past dawn,
nor caught fishes with bait of their own bodies,
nor set the homeless on fire.
You never cursed your luck except in shame to yourself.
I think I am afraid our best exalted intentions would not
weigh a feather.
We held in smoke till the seahorse exhalation swam
around the Chinese lantern while the oaks,
brazen with black birds, sang us down from heaven 20 years ago.
Their shadows threw themselves past us
as if we were stubble where in the afterlife of saying so
are my almost friends.
Oh, my dumb heart, why confess to you?
Could you ever lie for me?
Lay me down cold?
Lie down in a jar of wine and still refuse
the safety of dying?"
Three more.
I mean, Nancy and I have poems about the same places.
I guess that's a good thing.
You know.
This is a poem set in Cornwall specifically on a trail
from Saint Ives to Zennor where we lived for a while.
The path had a name.
It was called The Coffin Path.
It was about a 1,500 year old path that was created basically
to convey the dead from Saint Ives to Zennor
because there was no sanctioned church in Saint Ives.
And so for purposes of Christian burial, the [?
coffins were ?] marched, I don't know if they were marched
specifically, from Saint Ives to Zennor.
And there are all of these glorious cathedrals in the area,
but there was one that was really run down.
It was only 100 years old, which in Cornwall is like a 7/11
basically, you know.
But it was utterly deteriorated.
It was gone to seed.
It had a tree for a roof.
And it was indistinguishable when
you looked at it from the elements in a somewhat
disturbing way, not the way--
not the ordered way of say the prairie style architecture.
"Ruin Outlasting Sorrow."
"If we ever get free of our hungry world,
what will we have then?
The body?
It wouldn't know what to do with itself.
It wouldn't have a prayer.
Some obliterating justice?
The robin scrounging for a worm might cock its head
and go back to its business.
Every living memory would, gnarled and writhing,
pull its stakes from the ground like the deracinated espaliers
of ivy hanging to this ruined Cornish chapel looking half
electrocuted, come clean of posturing
but only into some last contortion.
We wanted no less than to step outside our century
into that chapel, walls all ivy and oak perfectly reroofing it,
the nave walls root- choked, the granite altar half ripped
by now, roots throttling roots for a hold climbing the walls
they'd taken into their flesh.
Barely distinguishable struggle between gray and green
just outside where the constant sorrow bodies of cows
grazing above the shipwrecks.
There we were in the midst of their tonnage beyond them
and ahead a village of granite hewed
from cliffs of sheer catastrophe into the amnesiac Irish Sea.
Church and inn and pub and piggery
sat squat on pastures' green bays like chess set pieces.
Nobody having made a move in centuries.
The chapel around us had almost evolved into a tree.
To say a few words without sorrow
is one thing, but a whole sentence?
Sorrow, give me a little more time.
Overhead passed a dry ice glint of a jet with its businessmen
and women and small camps of families
and plastic cups of scotch.
And when our body turns backwards,
it doesn't delay the flight.
On Earth, any moment we stumble into again to stare twice out
of its windows is frozen beyond peril.
It wasn't sorrow we were looking at.
It was the slow formality of ruin, the people, and the labor,
and the myth, and us.
Wasn't there sufficient regard?
Is this the terror of being without a last line or a body?
Cows load misunderstandings by the ton.
A little cloud was crawling like a snail
letting the sunlight have its way with it and dispel it
and turning itself inside out all white
as fat like inside the black bear I once watched dissected.
The pelt peeled like that to an interiority, all fat.
It looked like a cloud on a gurney.
It looked intact.
It was almost through being purposeful.
A few museum goers with special passes surrounded it
with plastic wine glasses and stared
as we stared out some chapel without a pew
up into some cloud light like historians who stare out
of their studies and judge the instant unforgivable
for outlasting history.
But in a dissecting room with strangers,
we stared at a bear stripped even of nakedness.
I still feel the desire to bury it."
One more.
All of my poems are--
they're kind of landscape poems.
My assignment to myself in this poem
was to use all that descriptive prowess towards the,
you know, inside of our house.
Which, you know, if our know house,
it isn't necessarily a promising subject.
It's a great house.
[LAUGHTER]
But Nancy, and I had gone to a--
we'd bought this-- one of those old black globes and that's sort
of the subject of the poem, and I guess--
and you know, I like miniaturization,
I mean, you know, little trains.
And I like that stuff in art because it
provides this kind of remove from your world, basically.
It allows you to imagine you can actually
be removed from your world.
But I was looking at this black globe
and man, the thing was so beat up
and something like the opposite happened
or it loomed larger than I did and still seemed
very insignificant.
"Black Globe."
"There's dust on it.
Someone hasn't taken care of it.
Someone has let it go from the smiling glance of fingertips.
A hunk of junk with a rakish tilt. Shore's
cancerous with populist dots.
Seas riddled and zippered by plane routes,
impaled by its axis.
The southern ice cap haloed by 12 timeless
giant clocks tattooed with old style planes crosshatched
by dashed off demarcations.
[INAUDIBLE] with puckering seams,
the poor Atlantic mightily dimpled.
The Caribbean has chips out of it the size of states.
We bought our world from an antique shop specializing
in stolen graveyard angels.
$3.
It's on a bureau below our silk screen
from Guangzhou, a yellow silk moon spouting ideograms
into a smudged charcoal flowering plum.
Neither moon nor Earth are unviable.
Earth can be hurt time and again.
Its final mercy: its vulnerability.
It lives for us and on it, we live
and it can hurt and suck us in but not this globe.
Its seas are tar, bituminous childish
nightmares as much dark as blood pulsing beneath the temples.
It is a lung.
So we bought it a blue sister, a child's globe, a lawn sale find,
a shrimplet version.
It is alone, though, with its glow worm analemma.
50 years old, about my age.
And it moans now when it spins and its spin wobbles.
The beautiful names don't fall off.
It still spins here in this slide as my grandfather spun
my childhood off the map.
And if the adult can stop it, please don't.
This dust ball could break the heart
into a perfect heartlessness of outer space.
Perfection.
Outer space.
Come in.
Our satellite dishes are starved for a friendly word.
I can see my face, a shadow shuffling black,
a little blacker without a single feature
upon vast tribulations.
Its words are white and ghosted, but I can read them."
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
We do have both authors' books for sale,
and I'm sure they'd be happy to sign them for you,
and there are refreshments.
So thank you very much for coming.