I do want to mention that Suzanne Gardinier will also be
giving a talk tomorrow in our Continuing Lecture Series,
and that will be at 11:00 in Student Union Room 283.
If you haven't been coming to those lectures,
they've been just terrific, and I anticipate
that this one will be as well.
So please join us for that.
Suzanne grew up in Massachusetts, lives now in Sag
Harbor, New York.
Her book, The New World, won the 1992 AWP Award Series in poetry,
and it's just out from the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Her work has also been in Under 35: The New
Generation of American Poets, and the Best American
Poetry 1989 and 1990.
She's won a number of other awards,
including the coveted and lucrative Lannan Literary
Fellowship.
She received her MFA from Columbia University,
and is currently working on a novel called The Seventh
Generation.
If you haven't read The New World yet,
you're in for truly a wonderful adventure.
It's a book that has a striking structure.
It's one book composed of five books, actually.
And as she said earlier today, if you
don't get the poem right the first time,
just keep writing it.
And each section of the book uses the same series of titles,
but the poems are really rewritten and really revisioned.
So that what comes together is an astonishing kaleidoscope
of voices and views, of what it is
to be a member of a tarnished and idealistic nation,
such as we are.
About the book, Adrienne Rich has written,
"this is a great poem of this end of our century.
It is masterfully structured in recurring themes and voices
which work on and off each other.
I found this a thrilling poem to read."
I'm sure many of you will as well,
and ask you to join me in welcoming Suzanne Gardinier.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I thought because of the structure of the book,
there are any number of ways that you
can jump in and jump out of it.
I had originally hoped that I could publish it
with no page numbers, but Pittsburgh was not
too wild about that.
So it still has page numbers, but I'm
going to sort of go through it backwards to forwards instead
tonight.
Just to give a little orientation,
I'll read a little bit from the notes at the back.
"The New World is centered in the circle
50 miles in all directions from Columbus Circle in Manhattan.
The messages from other parts of the world
are transmitted through this geographical area.
The only exceptions are the voice of Columbus,
and that of the ghost of Santo Domingo,
speaking from where they first encountered each other 500
years ago.
In the poem, many voices speak.
My name on it should not be understood as any claim
to originality or ownership.
I am less the poem's author than its gatherer, to make it,
I thought much less than I listened.
In the words of the Chilean song, 'Yo no soy quien canto,
solo soy la voz.'
The list of sources below--" comes after that.
I'm going to start at the very end of the poem.
The first sections that I'm going to read are the voice
of Columbus, who appears in a section called "Admirals,"
and the voice of the ghost of Santo Domingo.
Over and over again in the course of writing the poem,
I started writing it wandering around near Columbus Circle,
seeing that statue of Columbus up on his pedestal,
about three or four years before the 500th anniversary of his
landing.
And I kept thinking about that meeting, that day
actually, when he and his friends
showed up, and the values that they brought with them,
and the values of the people whom they met,
and how those two currents have survived.
And fortunately for us, one didn't annihilate the other.
So this is the end of the poem imagining that day.
It's in a section called "Migrations,"
and it's in the voice of the ghost of Santo Domingo.
"It was the moon of big winds.
In the night, I dreamed the dance of the death of the chief.
We have put his things in their places.
We sang in the circle.
We have wiped the blood from the Earth where he stood,
his abiding place.
We have smoothed over the Earth where he lay.
Then the new chief stepped forward,
but his face was hidden.
Now the council fire is rekindled.
We sang to him dancing.
The sorrow, we have borne it elsewhere.
From your throat, we have taken the grief.
You have lost that upon which your eyes rested trustfully.
Nevertheless there are many matters.
Now the Commonwealth rests in your hands.
The morning was clear, but all day the dream walked beside me.
The leaves of the tallest trees spoke its words
and held its hidden face.
By the stream rocks, we washed in the glinting sprays.
Over the water the sun swept to warm us.
Over the water the birds swept to eat.
Over the water the wind swept, to hurry
the end of the day's harvest.
Before dark, I slept again between two trees.
I saw over the water the sweep of gulls wings,
over the water a signal, a sail."
And this next is called "The Ghost of Santo Domingo."
"They gave us broken crockery, broken glass,
the ends of broken straps, broken fragments of hoops
that bound the wine casks, red woolen caps, hawks bells, glass
beads.
When he would not set his foot on the land,
we swam the cove out to his ship.
Some of us he kept and would not let go.
We offered pineapples and sweet potatoes,
and tried to tell him where the wind was light and the water
fresh and the reefs deeply buried,
and where trees spoke storm warnings most clearly.
He asked for the ornaments at our necks.
We gave bits of gold and rainbow parrots.
We embraced him, our lost one, our brother returned.
Before his fort and ruler and compass,
before those who touched him fell sick
and died, before we stopped lying together to make no more
children, before the women set free from their cabins
came back and could not eat or sleep,
before the withering of the blossom tree,
before we knew them, before the unmasking when
their flesh fell away and left fever and swords,
we welcomed them.
We danced and feasted.
We ran among the villages calling, come, come,
see the people from the sky."
This next-- I wrote the poem basically
by walking around with my yellow legal pads,
within that 50 mile radius from Columbus Circle,
writing down what I saw.
Fortunately for the poem, a lot of it didn't make it in,
but some of it did.
And one thing I kept noticing is--
I think of it as two parallel streams, of those values
that Columbus and the people who came with him brought with them,
and the values of the people he found there.
And the voices that they took on were so different in the poem,
going back and forth.
And so these are two more of them.
The first one is called "Admirals,"
and it's Columbus' voice.
And virtually every word in it comes from his journals.
And then I'll read another "Ghost of Santo Domingo,"
and you can hear the difference.
"Admirals."
"The people go naked, men and women
of handsome bodies and very good faces.
On the first island, I took some by force
that they might give information.
They remain so much our friends that it was a marvel.
Thus the eternal God our Lord gives victory
to those who follow his way.
They swam to the ships and brought us water.
They are so free with all they possess,
none would believe without having seen it.
Of anything they have, they give with as much love
as if they gave their hearts.
Of keen intelligence, they navigate all these seas,
but are timid beyond cure.
They bear no arms nor know thereof.
When I showed them swords, they grasped by the blade
and cut themselves in ignorance.
They have no iron.
Their spears are made of cane.
It seems they belong to no religion.
They are of the opinion that I and my ships
come from the source of all power and goodness, the sky.
In all the world, there are no better people nor better
country.
With 50 men, we could subjugate them and make them do whatever
we want."
"The Ghost of Santo Domingo."
"That the Earth may shelter and sustain us,
that she may wrap herself in mists
and put them off again before us, that she may be everywhere
touched by rain, that the planted mounds on the hillside
may prosper, that potato and cassava roots
may plunge deep and hold the black Earth tightly,
that the squash leaves may give moisture and shade,
that the island sea may swallow the sun,
and with celebration, return it to us,
that the manatee and its clan may prosper,
that the heavy winds may come in their time,
that the white sand may warm under the sun's body,
and may cool and moisten under the moon,
that the moon may navigate its passage safely,
that we may gather after the flood
tides, that the old rocks may know our newborn children,
that the ducklings may know our dying and dead,
that in solitude the old ones will protect us,
that our songs may travel with the fragrant smoke,
that we may smell good to each other,
that lovers may laugh and be satisfied,
that the village fire burn on unkindled.
We face each other and sing without ceasing.
We dance, we dance, we dance, we dance."
This is-- I'll read two more sections sort of
along this path.
One is one I wrote very early in the course of writing the poem.
It took me four years to write it,
and this was very close to the beginning.
And this is about Columbus Circle in Manhattan.
"He stares South on his column over anchors,
over the tree of heaven at his feet,
on an island where the avenues divide.
His hand on his hip, one foot forward.
Below in the dirty circular pool,
dead leaves float among the dumb fountain spigots.
In a tableau, a sailor hauls a wood boat ashore.
In the center, Columbus sinks under a royal standard
and a cross.
To the right is a tumult of vines and trees hiding shadows.
The corrosive rain has touched the image and blurred it.
From his post, he assesses the neighboring smaller island
of moored motorcycles, pedestrians prohibited,
push carts, gyros, souvlaki, a blanket spread
with nude magazines.
The cars simmer and hinder each other around the circle,
the drivers leaning and cursing.
The engines gutter and steam, and with their soot firings
erase the statue's messages, which include these words:
A Cristoforo Colombo donavo un mondo al mondo.
And a winged angel crouched, his nakedness hidden,
his hand on a globe, fingers dipping in."
And this last part of this trip through
is something that I wrote visiting
the Museum of the American Indian up in upper Manhattan.
"This afternoon, cut bound shocks of cane
lean against open backed vans on upper Broadway.
In back are coconuts hacked to the sweet white meat
with machetes.
Sweat darkens the sides of the shirts of the men
who hand out cups of iced juice from plaintains,
and pike oranges beside mounted blades,
their peels spun away in one continuous curving.
Up the street past red, white, and blue ice rockets,
papayas, and soaps called Dove and Shield,
on the hill is the stone museum.
Maya, Carib, Arawak in the sky.
Algonquin, Shoshone, Iroquois, Sioux.
And over Quixote's starving horse and broken spear,
Pizarro, Cortes, De Leon, Pinzon, Columbus.
Inside past the cashier, silenced, sealed in glass,
is a beaded condolence string with the deaths of 20 chiefs
nicked in the pendant.
Belts of quahog wampum tell histories in a language
of raised arms and evergreens.
A Cherokee sculptor from North Carolina,
in loafers and patience, a bear claw hung from his neck,
carved spaces from rock.
Pleased to meet you, two women say to a third,
gesturing toward the sculptor.
We have a boy on his reservation.
We wanted an American.
What were we going to get, a ghetto kid?
No, sir.
We decided on a Native American.
And no sir, we've never regretted it.
One opens a wallet and takes out a photograph.
He's 14 now, taller than me.
He's planning a military career.
From a wall, Buffalo Bill smiles his hired smile.
The chisel rings.
The Annual Report of the Minnesota State Treasurer,
July 4, 1863, records that from the military expense fund,
J.C. Davis paid for postage stamps,
canisters, transportation of arms, labor and arsenal, powder
and lead, and Sioux scalps, as per the order
that offered $25 to anybody for each scalp of a male Sioux
delivered to this office.
There's a case of hair.
Two tourists speaking German look and nod and murmur
the tribal names.
The cards beside the cases speak, but do not
say, on the day when the people understand
who you were, they will bite the Earth and raise to you temples.
They name a dusty race of strangers,
with no connection to we who step onto Broadway
and walk over the ravaged land.
At the hatches of the vans bearing fruits of the island,
the Admiral gulled and gutted and changed forever.
The children of former slaves, and the children of former slave
owners, and the children of their commingling,
greet each other in the tongue of the conquerors
and in its rebellious variation.
Babies sleep in strollers, their large lolled
heads at right angles to their narrow shoulders.
Their bodies, and later the crescent moon's blurred cusps,
testify beside the forges and furnace
smokestacks and sirens and trains
that this island is not a machine.
Inside the locked museum, the corner
is dark that describes the Taino, those who taught Columbus
how to feed himself and his men, how
to sleep in net beds hung between trees or hold hooks.
Taino was their word for themselves.
It was a word they spoke to strangers.
It was a greeting, meaning people of peace."
This next-- one of the cycles in the poem is a blues.
Part of what I wanted to do is use a form indigenous
to this country, which the 12 bar blues is.
And this first one, the you in the "Blues"
is addressed to this country.
And it's about the promises that were
made to me as a kid about what this country is,
and the gap between them and the reality.
And I'll sing it for you.
(SINGING) "You tell me no trouble's on your trail,
you tell me no trouble's on your trail.
But you got shakes and blood under your nails.
When you keep on lying like you do,
when you keep on lying like you do,
I can't love you the way you want me to.
You promised me something you ain't given yet, yeah,
you promised something you ain't given yet, you promised me,
and I won't forget."
This next section is called "To the City of Fire."
And there's a word in it, usahn, which was-- it's U-S-A-H-N.
And it's a word--
I wanted a word for coming from this country.
And American, for some folks, I know means
from Hudson's Bay to Tierra Del Fuego.
So I wanted something particular to here, so that's why it's USA.
It's also because every time I say
the word English for the language I'm using,
I hear British English in my head.
So I wanted a word for this English.
So that's what it does in this stanza.
"To the City of Fire."
"All along there have been places
where I have stopped my sentences to hear you.
For every word of this blathering figure,
four words' worth of attentive silence.
This poem is no more mine than the whorls of my fingerprints,
the graves of my ancestors, this usahn in my mouth and no less.
Here is the place for you to speak.
Alive or dead, midwifing this city's birth,
or leaving the neck-wound cord to its purpose,
or sitting by, or walking the hallway outside the red room.
Here is one place for you to say your piece.
Although since we began this journey,
you have started and stopped as you pleased, put your two cents
in or offered your silence.
I offer this now.
Tell me your part.
Tell me what I have not been able to imagine.
Tell me the universe that is parallel to the ones I know.
Tell me your ecstatic breakfasts,
what food pleases you, what gods, if any.
Tell me your mother and father, your sidewalks
and leaves, your exiles.
Tell me what you have told no one, hardly told yourself.
Tell me.
I'm leaning forward to listen."
One of the things I tried to do in the poem
was to make concrete the intimacy
that I feel with some things that aren't concrete.
Among them are ghosts, some of whose voices
you've heard already.
And some of them are ideas, I guess.
Although when I say ideas, it doesn't feel like that--
and one is the idea of peace.
And so there's a section of the poem that's called, "To Peace."
And I'll read some of those.
"To Peace."
"When will you come?
The days are long, the nights damp and quick, but many.
I am leaving the light for you, my traveler.
Where are you staying tonight?
What strangers fork and cup and sheets press against you?
The rumors that you were seen in the east have come to nothing.
Can you not send a letter?
Without you, the hours will not balance.
The summer burns and the winter snows course through the streets
and flood the low houses.
Our neighbors' faces are battlements.
But perhaps for you, we have lost this name.
We hunt each other underground, hold celebrations
in locked chambers, sleep uncovered in the rain.
The children no longer know your name or your features.
To the youngest, you are as near as what
hides under grave markers.
They have not known what it is to live with you,
my elusive, my empty the plazas my stay away.
How will I recognize your counterfeit?
Does the place where your foot meets the Earth still
keep the same imprint?
Has your blindness become more burden than gift?
Will you remember the way?
Will you feel the light's warmth and come in?"
This is another crabbier one, "To Peace."
"Peace, I have feared you, hated you,
scuffed dirt on what little of you I could bear near me.
Scorned you, called you vicious names.
Every time you have settled over an afternoon, a friendship,
a night walk, my brow, my sleep, I
have lashed free of your desolate island back
to the familiar continent.
Coward, I watched you buckle under night sticks and fire
hoses.
You have disgusted me, slipping flowers
into guns, holding hands with yourself,
singing to bullets and dogs.
Who can speak your language but animals and saints?
What history records your triumphs?
Over what centuries have you reigned, miasma?
Where are the stone lists of those
who have died in your name?
In the land where you are loved, what
becomes of the veterans of all against all?
How will I clothe myself?
How will I eat?
How will I teach my children whom
to respect, how to find themselves
on a map of the world, when I have so seldom seen your face?
Tell me bloodless, outlaw, phantom.
What is the work of the belligerents
in your anarchic kingdom?
Where is my place?"
This is the last "To Peace."
"Why should you come to meet me, your most awkward lover
stumbling over your name?
I have nothing to give you.
I have no way with gestures or sweetness,
nothing to say to those who spit on your likeness before me,
nor to those who insist that at last you are dead.
Nor to you, my invisible, breathing
your voice in the air when music falls silent.
Your step on the path when it's too dark to see,
your lips on my lips, and dreams vanishing
to morning's barren thistles caught in my hair.
Here there are many smooth words for you in all mouths but mine.
Here you are honored with banners stained yellow
for cowardice.
Here boxes of bones are laid at your feet,
and rifles thrust into your hands,
but you will not hold them.
I know you by the sound of the rifles falling
and the bones embraced.
I'm standing between two hills over water
on a narrow log, unsure underfoot.
You were late.
My legs are tired.
We share the long night waiting between us.
I your devoted impatient stranger,
you my skittish near with no sign, eyeing this bridge,
deciding whether to cross."
One of the things that happened in the course of writing
the poem was, I would get this feeling that I have right now,
this sort of heavy sadness in my chest
at what I saw in the course of making the poem.
And I needed something to give me
the strength to keep doing it.
And so that came out in the poem--
in the cycle in the book called, "Where Blind Sorrow Is Taught
to See."
And they're love poems.
"Before you, I walked with my hands in my pockets
by the dark deserted piers in all weathers.
Before you, I asked at the oracles of steel grates
and park maples' winter cordage, and tried
to decipher the admonitions of saplings and windows
of notebooks and globes.
Before you, I bluffed and hoarded.
I ranged the inconsolable archipelago bent
with useless offerings ungiven, past taverns and perfumes
and cardboard palettes, longing for the embrace of mannequins.
Trying to walk captivity's scent from my clothes.
Before you I could not hold oblivion tightly enough
against me.
The parsed day's murders and educations
settled into the bones of my face,
where I could no longer understand them.
Before you, blank tablets.
Before you, dumb.
Before you, I looked for you in the rubble of roadways
and broken impediments.
In the praying mantis climbing the pilaster,
and the bleak hacked view from the promontory,
in cuffed new leaves stirring in empty shoes.
Before you, I walked and whistled invitations,
and heard no answering voice before you."
This is another of the "Where Blind Sorrow Is Taught to See."
"Rain shines black with a red and white light laced street,
divides and becomes two.
The walkers hunch coats over their heads,
but no rain falls here.
Through the wall between us comes
your voice, you who give me shelter for the night.
Foot to piston fire to axle to tire to street with rain
between, makes music surge and ebbs with each change of light.
This song finds you a window across our bridge, you who
give me shelter for the night.
When does a bridge connect and when divide?
When the wind pushes further into this room,
the sill glistens.
Chimes ring but softly.
Your laugh rises and hushes them, you who
give me shelter for the night.
Sirens slur their frantic words, but here there is no danger.
The buttons down my shirt have all day held in my loneliness.
I unfasten them, invisible, to you who
give me shelter for the night.
The light on the page fails just outside the window.
The sheets are cool and dry.
The street slicks and chills, split in two.
Your warm arpeggios sound through the lath and plaster,
you who give me shelter for the night."
I had-- as I said, part of what I did
was walk around in that 50 mile radius, and see what I saw.
And part of the time I was in schools.
And that sense I spoke of at the beginning,
about being less an author than a gatherer,
comes from having listened a lot in the course of the poem,
and wrote down what people said.
And as Stan Max says in his comics,
all dialogue guaranteed verbatim in this next section
that I'll read.
It's called "At School."
"Excuse me, the teacher says, where are you going, mister?
Do you have a pass?
He nods.
May I see it?
He sighs, offers the paper, and stares out the door glass
laced with diamonds of wire.
On his chest are a skull and the words, harvester of sorrow.
The interrogation complete, he continues his journey.
She resumes her watch.
Something's burning, Charlie, a colleague tells her.
Can you smell it?
They don't know what it is.
Probably toxic fumes, she says, and we're all going to die.
Nah, Charlie says, hooking a thumb under his belt.
The buckle says USMC.
We're safe.
This is peace.
I did what I had to do over there, he says.
I went and when I came home, I lay in the streets to stop it.
I thought I would change the world.
I used to be an idealist, she says.
It's still in you somewhere, he tells her.
No, I don't think so.
Her gaze splits as another adolescent approaches.
When the revolution comes, Charlie laughs, you and me,
chickie, will lie in the streets.
Don't hold your breath, Charlie.
Yes I'm telling you, chickie, we'll lie in the streets."
This is something else I saw.
It's a section called "Democracy."
"Where there was furnishing and canopy, is now playing this.
General Washington's pew at St Paul's is
paint and varnished wood.
On a brass plaque is his prayer, the soldier surveyor
whom the Senecas called destroyer of towns.
Almighty God, we make our prayer that
will keep the United States of America in thy holy protection,
that thou wilt incline the hearts of citizens
to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience
to government, to entertain a brotherly affection
and love for one another.
Beside the padlocked alms boxes, the unlit candles,
and the velvet altar rope, a man with no elbows in his shirt
wields a bucket across the floor.
He stoops over the mangle, then heaves and sweeps
wet arcs over the tile.
In every pew of the sanctuary is a man,
each separate from the others.
One with cuts on his neck, one coughing,
one stretched facedown asleep, one awake,
with his head on his fists.
At half past 10, they rise and join the line for the tickets
for food."
I'll read two more sections, and then I'll sing a last blues.
This one is called "Refugees."
"Every night she dreams of departure
from successive islands of suffering.
There is no mainland.
There is no knowing the depth of any one island's pain,
until after her feet have settled on the new
and she looks back over the water.
But the glare blinds and her eyes are tired.
And already she can't remember.
On each new island are the orders and the barked opaque
new words.
A nod means no.
A wave means go away.
A pointed finger means here's the dirty place for you
to wait, to clean, to sleep, to live.
Each island has its order to be removed,
food to be cooked, children to be tended, and saved
these tasks for its most recent strangers, its little loved.
On her knees on the floor, or over the steaming heap
of clothes that are not hers, by the crib
of the baby who is not hers, and who will not stop crying.
A sudden sweep of her hand reminds her
of the gesture from the last island,
but it is gone in a minute.
The one she stands on, she calls this new world.
The one she has left forgotten, she calls home."
And this last one I'll read, is called "To the City of Fire,"
and that begins the book.
"If I forget you, let my sleep dwindle and vanish
in the dark early mornings.
Let sleep forget me until I learn to keep you near,
and not stray, and not rest in my wanderings
over your rutted face.
How can you think it can ever be finished between us?
Do you understand how the jostlings and marketplaces
of any other city, how any meadow or china
cup will summon you?
Dying, my provenance, eyes closed,
trailing blood from a severed leg left in the trap you made.
Do you think you will dance that dance forever?
Listen.
There will be a night when the steel din of your heartbeat
will fall almost silent, when I will ask your clamor from you
and it will be given.
I mean to stay.
I mean to last your rebuffs, betrayals,
trials of stamina and trust.
I mean to part your smoke, to sleep my mindful sleep.
And with that strength, hold you and say the parting words
over you, and listen to the manifold voices of those you
crushed struggle into speech.
To give myself, to help make what will come."
And this last of the "Blues."
(SINGING) "Come here, baby, wrap your arms around.
Come here, baby, wrap your arms around.
Want to hear you make them happy sounds.
Tell me in my ear where you come from, tell me in my ear
where you come from.
Tell me every sweet thing you ever done.
Ain't nobody but us here tonight, ain't nobody but us
here tonight.
Sing me all your old songs, it's all right."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thanks.
If anybody has any questions or wants to say anything,
feel free.
That would be great.
OK, thank you.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]