I'm not saying this in a commercial spirit,
but you should all buy this book.
Really.
In the back of the book is a DVD.
There are four or five minute video segments on it.
You will see a construction worker talking about Whitman
and reading Whitman, a Cambodian-American immigrant
young woman, who talks about a Langston Hughes poem.
A Jamaican immigrant, a guy who reads a Sylvia Plath poem,
just amazingly well.
US Marine, Steve Conteaguero.
He was a US Marine with a Hispanic surname.
He reads William Butler Yeats' poem "Politics"
and talks very movingly about it.
What is your name?
Dolly Spaulding.
Yeah, and which poem did you choose?
Yeah, what was your poem, darling?
Are you going to read it, or am I?
I don't know if that's exactly right.
I'll say a little bit about the project
and then I'll try to cajole you into reading it.
The project I invited Americans to write
to me, name, title, and author of a poem that the person loved
and a few sentences about why that particular poem was
important to that particular person.
My advertising budget was about $4.
And I got-- and the Library of Congress
doesn't support anything like that.
The poet laureate officially is in the Library of Congress,
but they don't give you any-- you don't have a secretary--
it's a sham thing.
It really is.
I got tens of thousands of letters and emails
including one from Dolly.
And I'll tell you how we chose the people
after she reads the poem.
I told the people who are helping me
and I made my main criteria in the choices
was, the interest of the relationship between the person
and the poem.
And, Dolly, I don't think there's
any way out of this for you.
I think you're just doomed.
First, I'll read you what I said, a couple of sentences.
I'm a lifelong inveterate fan of jazz,
and an unapologetic beatnik.
This poem is evocative of the time, the place, the ambience.
That's all I said.
And I was like, and then I got this letter.
I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe this.
So here's the poem, "The Day Lady Died" by Frank O'Hara.
It is 12:20 in New York, a Friday,
three days after Bastille Day.
Yes, it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I won't get
off the 4:19 at East Hampton at 7:15,
and then go straight to dinner, and I don't know the people who
will feed me.
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted
and buy an ugly New World Writing
to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days.
I go on to the bank and Ms. Stillwagon,
first named Linda I once heard, doesn't even look up my balance
for once in her life, and in the Golden Griffin,
I get a little Verlaine for Patsy, with drawings by Bonnard,
although I do think of Hesiod, translated,
Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon
or Les Negres of Genet, but I don't.
I stick with Verlaine after practically going
to sleep with quandariness.
And for Mike, I just strolled into the Park Lane liquor store
and asked for a bottle of Strega,
and when I go back where I came from to Sixth
Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theater
and casually asks for a carton of Gauloises
and a carton of Picayunes, And a New York Post with her face
on it.
And I am sweating a lot by now and thinking
of leaning on the john door in the five spot
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.
[APPLAUSE]
And everyone and I stopped breathing.
Well, we did have these thousands of letters,
though the Library of Congress didn't
do anything, my University, Boston University did.
They gave me computers and they gave me
graduate students-- slaves.
The slaves were chained to the computers,
and they actually ranked the letters, Dolly, from one
to five.
And the criterion I gave them was
the interest of the relationship between the person and the poem.
What you said evoked a whole year, a whole taste,
the whole understood O'Hara's passion, et cetera.
Then so they narrowed it down to like 1,000,
and I had a database that I could then put in my computer
and I could read the whole letters that people wrote.
And that's the basis of the three anthologies.
These anthologies by the way, the first one Americans Favor--
This is the third one.
They're published by WW Norton and Company, not
a charitable institution.
They publish these because they make money on them.
The first one is now in its 20th printing.
I'm happy to say.
For the videos, we never-- we were
supposed to make 100 and never raised
the money to make the other 50.
So they're all made on the East Coast and the West Coast, LA,
San Francisco, Seattle, Miami, Washington, New York, Boston,
Hartford.
The Clinton White House Millennium association
celebration and the NEA let us make the ones we did make.
My executive director, Juanita Anderson,
of Legacy Productions then in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Juanita has what are called interview skills.
So I gave her 70 names to make the 50 videos.
She calls the people up and she guesses which
ones will be good to film.
And she's a Black woman.
She's used to having to stretch a book.
She managed to make about 250 minutes of video for $500,000.
Very often, the people who we were shooting fed the crew.
And rather than pay plane fare, sending crew
around the country or motels, we had regional producers--
she knew in each region who the people were, who could do it.
We had a production school at BU for about four or five days,
we flew all of them to Boston.
Juanita talked to them about lighting and lenses and shots.
They had a library of shots.
And I talked to them about the project
and we had a favorite poem reading in Boston
where we had President of the University
and little kid and the construction worker who happened
was in Boston, so they could see what the idea was.
And you can tell from the videos, they got the idea.
It worked out very well.