Colleague Steve Orlen and to help usher him out
of the stresses and orders of administration
back into the fold of a working writer and teacher.
He's been directing the MFA program here, as you know,
for six years, and I'm sure he's glad to move back
into the relative quiet of his former role as a professor
and writer here.
Steve is from Holyoke, Mass, went
to the University of Massachusetts
and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
He's had most of the fellowships that he can get, I'm afraid.
I think he's had all the NEAs they allow him.
And he's also had some grants from the Arizona Commission
on the Arts.
His books include Sleeping on Doors, Permission to Speak,
A Place at the Table, and last year, The Bridge of Sighs.
Steve describes his poems as stories of friendship,
family, and marriage, poems which
catch the ritual moment in the ordinary, the touching
of a cheek, the desire, but the inability to give comfort.
And the speaker in his poems is a kind of acrobat
who balances the complicated and conflicting emotions that
swim into one's intimate and family relationships.
Please welcome Steve Orlen.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you all for coming.
Congratulations are due to Alison Deming on the winning
of the Walt Whitman award--
[APPLAUSE]
--for her new book, Science and Other Poems.
All right, as many of you out in the audience
are poets or students of poetry or readers of poetry,
I'm going to tell you a little bit
about the form of each poem as I go along
and a little bit about the inspirations for them.
The poems are lyrics and narratives.
The narratives are less storytelling
than they are situational dramas.
The poems I'm just going to read from this one book.
The poems are all poems of either experience or imagination
or a mixture of both.
And they're about as intimate and clear as I could make them.
I've divided them up into four sections to read.
The first group of poems, I'll read are poems of childhood,
my own and my son's, poems of love and marriage,
poems of relationship between men and women,
and poems of grace.
The first several of the poems of childhood
are fairly short, in a single stanza
in length with long lines.
I now have permission to read this first poem because my son,
who's eight years old, was going to come and I asked him if I
could read this poem, and he said I couldn't.
But he's not here.
He chickened out.
And this is a comical poem.
If it isn't, then I'm in trouble.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, you'll see.
"The Big Difference".
"It all comes down to this, all eyes upon it everywhere he goes,
the pizzle.
Mr. Peenie Weenie, thing of many names,
he hasn't plumbed the thousandfold functions of yet.
Not even the toes when first discovered
were so various in their knobby repetitions.
Mother doesn't have one.
She's hiding it, he says, and then insists,
then moves it forward like a torpedo through the water,
trying to keep up with it himself.
Already it's an obsession, more important than its uses,
without which nothing in his daily rounds
would have meaning as he waddles through the world
like a bowlegged cowboy with a brand new rope,
stretching it, stroking it, telling it stories, dragging it
back and forth as though it had an agenda of its own,
not to be reasoned with, something of a burden lately,
like a baby brother.
His mother smiles and tries to yank his diaper up.
Surprise, such a little thing can become such a big event
in the supermarket as we hurried down
the aisle to catch him, giggling all of us, the men nodding.
The women with their full carts stopped in amusement, him,
guessing what the fuss is all about, watching it subside."
[LAUGHTER]
That's some of the fun of being a little kid.
The next poem is about some of the difficulties
of being a child.
At this time, my boy was of preschool age,
I don't know, maybe three years old.
And we went to some place for the summer
up in Port Townsend, Washington.
My wife's a painter, and we both wanted
to do some work for part of the days while we were up there,
and so we looked for child care.
And if any of you've had children in this generation,
you know what it's like to put a kid in a place
where he doesn't know any of the kids,
and you just drop them off, and you stay 10 minutes and bye-bye,
and they're left to fend for themselves.
So this is about that experience.
"Child Care".
"He doesn't want to go there, but he goes
into the mouth of the monster.
In this case, this morning, the new mother sort
of person who welcomes him at the door in that overly
accustomed hearty necessarily false way of all day mothers
to the children of strangers.
This is the life, kid.
Every place you go, it's the same shabby overused slightly
greasy teddy bear, and the TV tuned to the same cartoon
characters banging away at each other,
and different faces with similar names eyeing
the new kid with his thumb stuck in his mouth.
Oh, they've almost got your number already.
They've got their tongues hanging out.
Isn't it convenient how the world lays itself out
into such predictable types, the biter, and the whiner,
and the gentle soul, the pouter you can bend to your will?
If only you knew which one was which.
It won't take long individual mouths
of mine clinging to my thigh to discover what really matters,
who's quick or slow to anger, which is the tightest corner
to defend."
Next poem is called "Porch Life".
It's a lyric.
I don't know what to say about it.
Lyrics are usually irreducible poems.
"Porch Life".
"The old man and the young man, shirtless down the street
on the porch of the two-story tenement, drink Coors from cans
and pee as they require in the dirt between the sidewalk
and the street.
They call, hello, as I walk by with my toddler
son, who says, how are you, like a future member.
Sometimes they call me Sir as though they don't quite
remember me, or as though to a boss, a man
to be reckoned with on a job when they have a job.
The group gets larger as the weather gets warmer.
Shirtless, shining in the evening heat,
they roar and stagger in circles on the sidewalk.
Snatches of their conversation drift into my open window
as I try to sleep, they get the facts mostly loud,
the past in tones of losing and regret.
Nothing changes but an occasional body.
They get their checks on Fridays.
The eldest grows daisies.
The youngest is quietest."
Thanks for the water.
Everybody got allergies right now?
I got-- This next poem is called "Standing in Line for the Pickle
Family Circus".
And it doesn't really matter in the poem
what you're standing in line for,
but that's such a great name of a wonderful one ring circus
that I thought I'd get it in.
It's an experiential poem, standing
in line for the Pickle Family Circus with my little boy.
This was also up in Port Townsend, Washington.
And there was a retarded girl, a young teenage girl,
walking around the line.
And the poem came from the distress
my son had in watching something he wasn't accustomed to see.
"You can tell it is bursting out of her, some accusatory snarl,
something to upset the children, out of the teenage retarded
girl in our midst as we stand in a raggedy line
for the small circus in a small town ballpark
by the sea among the gulls who vie for the stray popcorn.
She paces among us, threading our line,
tugging herself this way and that like a bulldog on a leash.
So my son clings tighter to my thigh, to my leg, demanding,
papa, hold me.
All the parents here are thinking,
we would like to hide her in a hole.
And how lucky not to have a child like that, a daily inexact
puzzle to solve, with huge teeth and huger
gaps between and a huge slash of a mouth and crossed eyes
so she looks like an angry laughing
grizzly bear on the prowl, asthmatic, drooling, sucking
at the air around her, biting at it sometimes until finally,
she can hold it in no longer.
She points to the birds, and my son
is calling, help, help, as if I couldn't all along have
seen or heard."
This is a poem called "Pilgrims."
and it's a little narrative of travel in which you meet,
you're out in the road, you go to a restaurant or a diner
or whatever.
And you meet strangers and you play a little geography
game, where you from, where do you live, where did you grow up.
And hoping that you'll make some contact with a stranger
and maybe get a sense of home out of it.
"Pilgrims."
"I meet him in a diner near Seattle, a man from Florida.
Tucson, I tell him as we chew the terrible food talking so as
not to taste.
New York, he says confident one stranger to another.
Me?
Holyoke mass, I say.
Digging into my mashed potatoes, buttering my soft roll shaped
like a torpedo, wondering why we even stopped at this place
except my son was whining in his car seat and it was almost noon.
The man from Florida shifts his bulk
and raises one eyebrow as if about to test
some eternal verity.
I knew a guy from Holyoke, in the army, in the war,
and I am leaning forward getting a sudden rush of photographs
that begins with my old yard and spreads
as if from above in a helicopter.
The triple deckers, the open porches,
the fathers in the early morning swinging their black lunch
boxes down the narrow walks click, click.
Then in that sly way older people have of pulling rank.
He says, you wouldn't know the guy,
I'm old enough to be your uncle and winks.
Until at last he gives it up, Jack Sullivan.
I wipe my son's face and fuss with his filthy shirt front,
so as not to appear overly eager, which is a way not
to be on the road in America.
I knew the guy, he was my neighbor, a policeman,
says the man from Florida.
This Jack was a gym instructor and then
the feeling goes away of being somewhere,
of being anywhere as I nibble at the fried chicken,
and the walls recede, and I begin to lose the smiling wide,
and handsome face of my Jack Sullivan.
The yellow house eroding at the edges,
his mother in silver braids, his sisters Rosalie, Sheila, Mary,
and the other whose name I never knew.
The other sister was a sister--" means a nun-- "the other sister
was a sister, he says.
Yes, Yes that's my Jack Sullivan.
[LAUGHTER]
And I'm almost crying with the victory and the effort
to keep the picture whole to take my wife and son,
and place them in that house just after World War II,
beside the Sullivan clan good people everyone.
But the man is not convinced, he wipes his plate
with a slice of buttered bread."
[LAUGHTER]
The next poem is the title poem of this collection,
it's called "The Bridge of Sighs."
And the poem is written in basically rhymed triplets.
The Bridge of Sighs is an actual bridge in Venice, Italy,
and when I wrote the poem, I remembered the name--
I was looking for a hyperbola to describe
the arch of my mother's foot, which is something like that.
And--
[LAUGHTER]
I didn't know much about what the Bridge of Sighs
was except it's obviously a very poetic and a pretty name.
And then I looked it up and found
that it had a special meaning and that it
fit in the poem in ways that I hadn't thought of.
It's a poem about pleasure and it's
a poem about a boy's, a little boy's love for his mother.
And it turns out that there's a double thing
in the Bridge of Sighs, it was-- it's a bridge where lovers go,
but it's also a bridge where in the old days several years ago
in Italy, people who are about to be executed
crossed that bridge.
So it has a certain poignancy on it
and their lovers wives, mistresses,
family, whatever would have to wait on the other side.
It's also happens to be a high bridge,
it's connects to buildings rather than a low bridge
that goes over the canals.
I think this is a comic poem too, it better be.
"The Bridge of Sighs."
"Believe me when I tell you I have
tried to understand pleasure, the beginning of pleasure.
How I watched my mother that morning
lounging in the red plush chair, in the gray submerging
shadows of the parlor as she talked on the phone.
How I stared with each of my five years
at the tender curve of her ankle as
it moved down the high instep of her dry, clean, pale,
and perfect foot, and over the toes underneath to the arch.
Oh, it just leapt.
More delicate than the arches of the bridges of Venice,
built by those gentlemen, the Doges,
paved by the feet of centuries of lovers,
and saved from destruction by the American soldiers
on a similar moThe Bridge of Sighs.Oxford, Ohio:
Miami University Press, 1992.rning
as I watched my mother's foot tense, and relax.
And when she smiled down her long body at me
and stroked my hair and offered me the smooth beauty of her foot
and asked me, yes, to rub it just a little,
she said right into the phone to whomever, ahh.
[LAUGHTER]
The ahh of the beginning of pleasure
that demands, even as it gives itself up,
that leaves you always ready to begin, always
on the lip of things, like a young woman standing
by the Bridge of Sighs, waving goodbye
to the soldiers of the losing side,
waving hello to the soldiers of the winning side."
[APPLAUSE]
Next poem is called "Religious Feeling."
It's in couplets with long lines and it's
a drama of arm wrestling between a teenage boy
and his father looked over by the mother who has expressed
a certain feelings in the poem.
"Religious Feeling."
"When the son challenged his father to arm wrestle
at the kitchen table and the father
allowed the challenge to persist without acknowledgment,
spreading like an after dinner stain.
The atmosphere got larger, the room surrounding
them became like the air released from a church organ,
booming suddenly into the shuffling unrepentant silences.
The mother held their clamped hands in her light grip
and glanced out the window at a woman raking and a man
bending to retrieve a toddler from a pile of leaves.
How calm and strong her own husband
seemed, balanced on a wooden chair,
knowing age would erase this scene,
like a slow and steady wave across a beach.
And her son, if only he had the sense yet
to count the taken breaths between the challenge
and the act.
She began to count.
1, 2, 3 holding her glance out the window at the child,
still burrowing in the maze of light and dark the wind
prepared itself to take away."
The next poem is called "A Family of Three."
Most of my poems seem to have dramatic situations.
This doesn't have one.
It was written as a conscious imitation
some of the poems of the English poet Craig Raine
whose poems have almost no story and proceed
almost completely by images and I wanted to give that a try.
It's a simple situation family of three sitting down just
before going to sleep, watching the sun go down,
watching three birds outside the window.
"Supper done and dishes, the bath, pajamas
and the evening glass of milk, light in all the rooms
is waning from the pruned back habits of the day stories.
We sit before the picture window watching the last light
leave the backyard, darkening the clothesline, the garden
hose, and a wishbone of patio chairs,
and one blue skeletal palo verde tree
with eked-out golden blooms.
And flocks of various birds rush down from a cloudless sky,
and muddled greys, and browns.
All looking too much alike to call them beautiful
or name them from the book of birds open on the coffee table.
They line up at the house-like opaque plastic window
feeder in a fast thrashing of wings and knuckled beaks,
scrambling for seed.
We watch this every evening through glass, three of them,
three of us, until the dark takes them away from us,
and us from them."
The next group of poems are of love and marriage.
The first one is it's called "The Early Poetry"
and it's in couplets and it's an extreme act of imagination.
"The Early Poetry."
"This morning on a day bed several blocks
from here a woman you will someday love is being conceived
and you lean to hear the moans, the rhythmic bouncing slightly
embarrassed as you squint at the tired faces of the salesman
and his wife, both immigrants, both uncomfortable,
he on his lunch break, she out of work.
And no matter how quickly you rush
to protect the baby, the little girl, the young woman,
your future wife, she falls down,
she gets a forever black scar on her knee,
she faints on the subway, a bum thrusts his head up her skirt
and so on.
While you watch and wait like a movie beginning in summer
and ending in spring with its brief interludes, various dogs,
children, moments of pensive regret,
until you suddenly remember that you are an 18-year-old clerk,
in a white shirt, at your clerical pace
with a fading and useless history and hardly
a present tense.
And you are seized with impatience for the future
you've glimpsed, so you write it down
in rhymed couplets, the red car, the intruder, the needle,
the phone call, the print of Durer's on the yellow wall.
You tap your pencil once, twice, three times on the metal desk.
Now, when you wait, you wait with dignity for a future
enclosed with rhyme.
As it takes shape, you are inside observing, inventing."
Your next poem is called "The Older Woman."
It's in half rhymed quatrains, there's
an allusion to Swan Lake ballet in here
and I had forgotten what my--
I had to look it up at the time it came into the poem
and I had to figure out what it was doing in my imagination.
And today, I was on the phone calling
a bunch of people trying to figure out
what the allusion meant, but in the--
'cause I forget it.
I mean, everybody had to go see Swan Lake when they were kids
and nobody remembers the story, I checked about 20 people
in the English department and nobody knew it.
Except for one person who told me to call the music department
library.
[LAUGHTER]
And I did.
I'm not going to get the story right,
maybe somebody knows it better than I,
but anyways a man is in love with a woman
and she is transformed into a swan, he goes out hunting,
there's a black swan and a white swan,
and he's got his bow and arrow and he shoots the wrong one,
so he kills the swan who is really his girlfriend, wife,
lover, mistress, mother, somebody I don't know
what, I don't know what she is.
It's only a small part of this poem, but I figured I'd--
[LAUGHTER]
--do it.
"The Older Woman."
"Blurring at the edges of her hips,
she rose from the bar stool, took my hand
leading us down 12th Street, up the elevator to her bed.
And because of the sad pleasurable aching
of one stranger with another, I wish I could have said,
I'd never seen a more beautiful sight,
when she rose naked from the bed and put Swan Lake on the record
player to try--
to dance the pas de deux alone in her swan's
body with her socks still on and her watch.
Black swan, white swan, back and forth across the half lit room.
I didn't take my bow and arrow, I didn't shoot her by mistake,
I didn't love her, I was young and we didn't know each other.
So probably we tried to talk after the record stopped.
By now, more mutually estranged and desperate than before
and I moved closer and we tried not to sleep."
The next poem is called "Blame" and it's simply
a poem about that, in which a man has wronged the woman
and she is letting him know it.
"I deserved it, every word, blame and castigation,
the horribly precise words knifing out of her mouth
as we sat on a curb one late summer evening on Broadway.
She had a cold and blew her nose incessantly, carefully,
ladylike from a box of tissues in her lap,
then she'd ball them up and stuff them
down the grating of a sewer.
It was almost, though of course it
wasn't, impersonal, her mouth moving steadily as if to push
silence out of the way.
One hand patting her nose and me listening blank faced,
consuming, not speaking.
She repeating as if teaching a dog the simplest restraint.
I with no answers, nothing to say, but sorry, nothing to do,
but bear it and almost excuse me enjoying it
and she too, I think.
A cool Manhattan evening, people walking
briskly by at the edge of autumn where
love loses the sharpness of its light, letting the righteous
blame beam onto me its lasting attention."
The next poem is called "A House"
and it's basically about how subtly love,
a love relationship changes over time
and the house is a metaphor for the marriage itself.
"A House."
"Their mouths blur like leaves caught in a crosswind, lips
barely, softly touching there, and behind the lips
the hard white teeth, and further in,
pink membranes pulsing to see the breath.
How deep is a mouth?
How far in before you find the other?
Some nights they fall asleep like that, then wake up,
walk out to check the weather, breakfast together,
and off to the world for a day.
All morning and all afternoon inside the house, shadows
change places with light, noon then twilight, dusk,
until the shadows become one darkness.
How thoughtless it looks to a passerby room by room,
the lamps go on as though to repair the harm
the hours have done.
But what can you say in dark or light that hasn't been said.
Good morning?
Good night?
A kiss again?
Then in the body's deepest place as in a room
revisited after years away.
Some space you thought of as your own, same radio, same bed
and sink, same view, you meet another passing through,
a pilgrim not quite familiar, not quite a stranger.
What will you say?
This is where things change sometimes,
this is how some people love."
In the next few poems are about relationships
between men and women in general whatever that means.
And they're not marriage poems, I guess.
This poem is called "Life Drawing," it's in four sections
and it's a little bit longer than most of the other poems.
It's basically about sitting in a life drawing class
and seeing the human body as an art object in a sense
and as more than that as the poem develops.
This is a reference in the first line, first sentence that
indicates that these are not professional artists,
these are just working people who are taking an art class late
at night or in the evening on life drawing.
"At night in the museum art school,
the men and women whose daily jobs don't require their hands
or eyes to surrender to such intimacy.
And the instructor passing over us and everything
around the room in shadow gathers
to intensify light on the model's body, a stranger's,
a woman.
The charcoal starts erratically almost of its own accord,
though we're hardly aware of time anymore,
hands moving to match body part to body whole, nipple to breast,
the long waist to the shadowy haunch like a blue whale rising,
falling back into the feeding dark.
Her eyes are closed.
What could she be thinking of?
Her boundaries shift between each taken breath.
More sure of their universe than we,
the old masters drew her as an angel descended,
walking across a country road lost, not in thought but motion.
Sundays, the men who hang out at the park
love to describe women, the young men
sweep the air with huge motions, like liars
after hours of no bass at the county reservoir,
with a wink to the boy who caught the fish,
but doesn't know yet a woman's figure matters
enough to tell lies.
The old men's hands seem to stutter,
they might be shaping the lost map of Thrace, stone house,
stone wall, a horse nibbling grass,
clouds from the long neigh.
Hands that labored in stone or wood or dirt
for years, when they're about to fly off the wrists,
vanish into their pockets.
All the postures of flesh blur in the overhead light, the model
stretches, she puts on her glasses and pads
naked and noisily among us like a silvery carp stranded
on a beach or water as it overflows
its banks seeking a new shape.
She wants to see just how we have depicted her,
then bends to pick up her clothes and with her back to us
puts them on slowly.
Bra, panties, and a shirt, blue jeans, rubber thongs.
What lay there in a stillness older than statues
of gods made from clay and spit is a teenager
in a Rolling Stones t-shirt.
If she could have walked the lumps of charcoal
careful to reproduce, she might have thought: child playing dead
at sunset after supper on the front lawn under the privet.
Horizon, hill, hill after hill someone cares enough about
to sit and draw.
We all love to look and as we can't always touch,
we walk home to more familiar shapes.
The curves follow the light from the open door
and even as I sit on the bed and stare and wake my wife,
even as my breathing starts to echo hers,
there is something I can't have.
The drowsy neck, the hollow back of the knees,
the ear that goes around, the feet like a slum at dusk.
There is also the body as a version of habit, skin deep,
body going deeper, pleasuring itself, even as it pleasures us.
Body the hotel of the spirit, elusive and presiding,
belonging to nothing and to no one."
[APPLAUSE]
The next poem I also had to ask at the music
library about a reference to--
I've got the references here, I just forgot what they meant.
The poem is called "Carmen" and in brief, the history
is that originally it was a play by Mérimée, then
an opera by Bizet, that's the opera we all know.
Carmen, by the way, means song or poem in--
in Latin, in the derivation of it, but that's the part
I found in the dictionary.
But in this case, it's about--
the poem called "Carmen" comes not from those sources,
but rather from a Spanish movie that
came out about 10 years ago also called Carmen in which
a troupe of--
a director and troupe of actors and actresses
are about to put on a flamenco, Carmen.
And as you know Carmen is about a love triangle.
But in the movie within the movie
in the play in the background, the two actresses
are both in love with the director,
and the director's sort of dictating
the action of the performance they're going to do,
but also the complexities of all their love for one another.
That's all.
"Carmen."
"This is the scene in the factory
with the women, the older women who aren't burning anymore,
but slowly burning out even in repose.
And the young women luscious and giggling at the long tables
in their work clothes.
This is Spain and not the opera, but the movie in which
two women love one man.
The first is dignified, and steady, and aging,
and the other is Carmen.
In such a world the question might
be this, which is the stronger force, love or passion, and who
decides?
In the movie, it's supposed to build slowly and stay hot,
the director says.
And in response, the older women moan out little untranslatable
complaints.
And the young women who don't know any better slap
the dusty floor with their feet then start
the dry sulfurous clicking of flamenco castanets.
The dance begins.
Carmen will fight Christina to the death,
the knife hidden along a hip will slash Christina's throat.
All the women know that now by heart, it is so in the opera,
in the play by Mérimée, it is happening
in the story behind the scenes that echoes the film's story,
it is directed by a man who is himself the lover in question.
In real life, the fight would have been ugly but inconclusive.
Probably, they would have just stood up during lunch break
and cursed.
What would you do and whose story are you living?
The dancer dabbing at her throat in the mirror,
slowly changing in the changing light or the dancer
kept young and available by the gods and perpetual punishment.
Or are you searching the story's one weakness
that would loose both women in quick stabs upon the world."
The next poem takes place in a bar and two people are talking.
And the poem is about basically the mutual curiosity
of love life between a lesbian and a heterosexual male.
It's called "Buddies."
"If you saw us talking in the crowded bar knees touching,
leaning to whisper, you'd probably think lovers,
but no, she likes women.
She's talking along like my best buddy,
with great delight, some decorum.
And as our conversation escalates with the Scotch,
I get incredibly curious and ask for more
to imagine one female body against another.
The plump one, she says and the one with the shoe
and then it all goes blank.
Now tell me, she says.
It's only fair and despite myself I'm
confiding, whispering the good parts,
she's laughing, I'm taking in her hair,
her perfume, which doesn't end but flowers
in a touching muskiness.
My whispers draw her closer, her blouse flutters
in the bar's smoky chatter, she holds her breath,
so I can see into the narrow width that
represents our differences, she rears her head back
and she roars."
The next poem is called "Shame" and it's about--
oops, spilling water over.
As Charlie Chaplin used to say.
It's about a mistake in childhood
and a misunderstanding that followed it
and basically it's a mistake of language.
But it's also a mistake of a mistaken intention.
"Shame."
"I must have called him queer or said it to someone who knew him
and it got around because his mother forbade my company.
I couldn't have meant it as we mean it now, but rather weirdo,
nerd, oddball, dork, which was bad enough
and which he was I thought in the seventh grade sense.
Though, even as my mother spoke in low admonishing tones
across the living room from the telephone
call and I denied the accusation vehemently
and for days afterwards.
I understood what pain it caused the boy, how such remarks enter
the bone, settle in, become another circle in a person's
character, and felt ashamed and never did see him again.
That was 30 years ago.
Never again is punishment enough for an adolescent,
though I have heard he is a happy family man,
a famous sociologist, somebody I would like to talk with now.
Usually, I will be sitting among people
and it will strike me, the slight wrenching in the gut,
the brief argument with my younger self,
I didn't mean it quite like that.
Then the urge to track him down, to
phone him, to explain, apologize,
analyze like sensible adults.
Then I will have to rise and walk off
as though I were the one cast out, wrapped in a strangeness
I'd tried to give away.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm going to read four more poems
and these are poems of grace.
I wrote that down I thought, well, what do I mean by that.
There poems in a sense of moments in which we
rid ourselves of ourselves.
The first one is called "Celebrity" it
takes place in Kennedy Airport.
And they have these long--
what do you call them, the long walkways
and you walk by all these lounges and at one point,
I looked up and there was Tony Bennett walking by
and everybody looks up and everybody
waves to him and really that's all this poem's about.
"Celebrity."
Tony Bennett, you all know who Tony Bennett was?
No, you don't know.
[LAUGHTER] He was--
he was always the older guy, he was--
he was a-- he was the next down from Frank Sinatra
of another generation.
Who's Frank Sinatra?
He was the next down from Enrico Caruso, I don't know.
So he's a man and he's probably in his late 50s or early 60s now
and he was--
he was a famous crooner.
I'm really before my time also.
[LAUGHS]
He wasn't no Elvis, I'll tell you that.
"Celebrity, Tony Bennett."
"He shines through the airport like a retreating star,
through lounge after lounge, he is a slowly
disappearing glow as our faces rise nodding,
we raise our voices, we wave.
It's like one of those waves at a football game, all the bodies
part of the rhythm of what we missed and had not
known we missed.
And finally, we belong.
And he too in his way, with his deep
immutable tan and hair hardly a shade too dark,
walking somehow too slowly like an aging ex champ
who enters the ring and shadow boxes for the crowd.
Dressed in a dark blue suit that shows
just how large and powerful he really is.
Larger than any of us."
The next poem is called "Acts Of Will"
and it's in rhymed six line stanzas.
And it's basically about the experience
of entering one's own despair as an act of will
to see what happens when you come out on the other side.
"Acts of Will."
"Uncertain nights, the bad mood takes you by surprise
and all the faces you meet shrink to the bleakest, farthest
stars.
Oh, take a bus as far as it goes to the city's edge,
that no man's land where it idles, breathing like a house
alone in an empty field.
You don't of course, and the night shoves you along
in unhooked trains of association.
Old regrets, blunders, humiliations, loves, the dead,
and nothing stops you until the end defeats the mind's
self-repairing chemistry.
What draws us into such a narrow place,
a nameless cordless heartless chasm.
Doubts, we thought we'd overcome,
our body's occasional need for despair,
or is it the numb bliss, oblivion, we desire.
Wouldn't it be better to talk to ourselves
in a dark of our own choosing go home, phone a pal
or read a book, dance to the radio's late ballast of music?
How long you stand there fascinated?
You touch your cheek, you need a shave.
What casual truths such moments absorb,
those small decisions arrived at in the dark?
Stall a moment longer, then whistle, sing, grin, my friend,
welcome to the loneliest communion, an act of will
from which you won't return quite whole."
Next poem is called "Acts Of Grace"
and it's two narratives really two basically unlinked events
that I hope come together in a gesture
of some sort in the poem.
The first narrative is of working
in a factory as a teenager and with the monotonous work
of standing in front of a machine all day,
of meditating on God.
And the second narrative is much--
years later, of walking down the street on an afternoon
and seeing a very old woman standing on a little balcony
dancing with a photograph, doing a little waltz
with a photograph.
This is called "Acts of Grace."
"All one summer I thought about God, this in the factories
and at an age when I just as soon
have felt like any ordinary apprentice machinist, a recently
graduated high school kid, no different from anyone else.
All around us the din of huge machines, routers and lathes
that cast the high windows with metal dust.
And now and then, the random lap of waves
off a nearby canal creating a timeless sanctuary baffle.
I'd let my mind work until the thought
broke when the whistle blew.
One time, one of the men must have
sensed the burden of my thought because he asked a question so
generalized it felt intimate.
I don't remember what, but I must
have been amazed as I am now by any unexpected heartfelt
endlessly answerable question.
Maybe I felt that slurring in the brain that happens a split
second into an accident.
Anyway, I didn't so much decide to quit
as I drifted into other jobs than college and so on.
I thought about it just a while ago, probably, I was so shy back
then God kept me company.
Or God was pure attention, abstract like a mantra.
It hardly matters now, it's so happens
the poplars are in leaf, bordering
each yard, the white perennial African daisies and poppies
whose languid yellow petals seem to palpitate, like flesh.
I was out walking, I glanced up.
On a balcony above the avenue stood
a very old woman dressed in a robe and slippers.
I saw that in the raised circle of her arm,
she held a photo in a frame.
Then she was moving, she was dancing with the photo, a waltz,
as though she'd heard the call while ironing
and it just fell on her like old clothes or spring snow.
And just as suddenly as she began,
she stopped and bent her body out
a little over the neighboring yards, rows of houses, trees,
flowers in their beds.
Sometimes, this world's almost the safest place to be."
And this is the last poem, it's called "At the Indoor Shopping
Mall" and I don't know what to say about it, except it's
a lyric moment expanded.
"At the Indoor Shopping Mall."
"Either the snow's persistence or inertia
sat me down after I'd run my errands
beside a blue tiled fountain, and wherever I looked,
young couples wheeled their sleeping infants.
And in and out of shops went wives
with trailing identical husbands in brightly colored trousers.
Isn't it lovely?
said an elderly woman beside me on the bench
beside the circular fountain.
Her dress was a field of flowers.
Over the flowers, the spray from the water
was blue as the waters of a bottomless lagoon
and I there beside them emptied of need and happy at last.
Until I saw way down below what seemed the movement of a fish,
lantern jawed, and glowering, eyeless as a rock.
And the slow muffling weight of water
burying itself in water, breathing it in.
And further down like a vast and stupid secret, the plain bottom
we can never see but no, isn't it getting late? she said.
She rose from the bench, a field of endlessly
intricate wild flowering weeds, then
came the soft and airy whoosh of revolving doors and shopping--
shoppers coming through with armfuls of packages.
And it was December again in the north,
in the windowless light of perpetual waters."
Thanks for coming.
[APPLAUSE]