Well, since I'm reading brand-new stuff,
this is a poem that I sent to The New Yorker,
way back in January.
And I haven't heard from them.
[LAUGHTER]
You ever call up The New Yorker poetry?
I think I called up to find out what was going on.
And you call The New Yorker poetry line.
They have a machine, and it says,
this is The New Yorker poetry department,
and then they tell you exactly-- they say,
you can submit any number of poems
so long as they don't exceed a total of five pages.
And if you haven't heard from us within 90 days,
please feel free to submit again, because we do
get thousands and thousands of poems.
We read everything, but if you haven't heard from us within 90
days, feel free to submit again, because yours
might have gotten lost in the shuffle, that kind of thing.
We accept no emailed poems and no poems by fax.
So I got it straight.
I sent them a couple of poems.
This is one of them.
And it's a poem that took a year to write.
I wrote it on airplanes.
And I don't know where it came from.
And one of the marvelous things about poetry
is that it's an opportunity to tap into all these mysterious
and kind of, I think, divine sources.
And I would only write on this in a notebook
when I was on planes, and it took fully a year.
I completed it in London in November of '96,
and I don't know where it came from,
but it's called "An American Champion in Love."
And it's about a pubescent girl who's a track champion.
I used to run track in high school as a sprinter.
I did the 220 and 440 and all that, so that could
be connected with it.
But something happened, and it came out
in these quatrains rhymed, and I'm going to read it to you.
"An American Champion in Love."
And one of the things you'll find in reading my poetry
is that I'm not a big fan of the confessional mode.
I like to try out a lot of different voices
and just pretend to be other things and other people
and all of that.
I find it more interesting than the "I" all the time.
I was telling the undergraduates at the poetry colloquium
yesterday that Philip Levine, he came to Stanford once when
I was teaching there years ago.
And he said that--
he told me that his first book of poems,
which was being handset in Detroit,
was repeatedly held up because the printer was always running
out of capital I's.
[LAUGHTER]
So that made him think about what he was doing.
[LAUGHTER]
"An American Champion in Love."
"On borrowed time, she took another prize,
yet something held her back, breathed down her neck.
What slowed her breathing slept around her eyes,
their salty edges thickening where
flecks of reckless juicy light rushed in.
First place no longer met her need.
Her big time dream dissolving, sliding, melted on her face.
Even her dreams would scald her when
they steamed into their hot half lives
and she could feel their weight--
the medals.
Wild sweat clogged her nose.
What had her on the run?
What made her heel and toe the line now?
Love.
The way it rose like afternoon, no night before, no dawn,
no morning sun, no warning light, no clue.
Was it OK to cry, all right to yawn?
No frame of reference, no things to do list aided her.
No.
Nothing but a glimpse of parted clouds remembered, skydive gear.
The rush a silly monkey's jump, a chimp's; the moving ground,
a grin from ear to ear.
Fear suited up.
Love cut her gut some slack.
To run only to win seemed pointless, dumb, like living
on the mark, get set, attack.
Where had the old thrill gone?
Now she felt known.
She'd lost her heart, but how?
No silver cup, no bronze, no plaque, no cash, no ribbon
went with territory wired to trip her up at every turn.
Tricky.
What had win meant?
Where had she spent her childhood?
In a vault?
She loved to run.
Her parents loved to win.
She'd win a race and turn a somersault,
and daddy, mommy, both would clap and spin.
Her trainers told her, 'Stop that.
Act your age.
Be dignified.
Don't pull that kind of stuff.'
So sure enough, she studied sports page, TV, news magazines,
and even rough, old, scratchy, training films
they showed at school, the '36 Olympics in Berlin,
Ben Johnson's fall, why steroids were uncool,
that German girl they caught with doctored urine.
Routinely, they watch re-runs of their meets on videotape.
What could they teach?
Sometimes her fantasies would beat their own retreats,
flickering with pissed off Hitlers,
busted rhymes she'd hear and picture
blasting while she raced.
When Wilma Rudolph cheered her from the stands,
she knew she couldn't lose.
The meet was aced.
She dreamed of setting records, foreign lands,
Olympic sprinting, winning, triumph, cash.
Poor, sickly Wilma never told herself,
'100-meter relay or dash, 200, hey, no way.
I'm on the shelf with this bad leg of mine.
Just count me out.'
So just as all her heroes had inspired
the way she outstepped shadows, undid doubt,
this runner always scored.
She never tired, never ran out of steam or guts and balls,
whatever girls ran out of-- ovaries?
A winner, yes, but not the kind who hauls off, takes the cake,
and splits.
October sees to that--
her birthday month, a lucky time of year.
'I'm yours,' October always told her.
To crave my light has never been a crime.
A patriot, she was.
No athlete soldier dispatched to patch up social policies.
Democracy is a tyranny, she'd read in Plato's The Republic,
ancient Greece.
Their lit class gasped, 'What nerve!'
That's what he'd said.
We've got the greatest system in the world.
There never would have been a USA
if every king, and queen, and duke, and earl, and emperor,
and tyrant had their way.
She'd fight for that.
Oh, yes.
She would defend the land she loved, the only home she knew,
the same way Jesse Owens put an end to Nazi big talk,
proving who was who.
Her country, love, which would she
sacrifice when duty called, if push came down to shove?
The fix was in.
She thought it rather nice to let it hang, not have to choose,
just love."
[APPLAUSE]