My plan is to begin with some older work
and then read from the book Proverbs of Limbo.
And I hope there will also be time for me to read
some recent poems, poets--
a vanity that the poets here know.
We always like to have something we just worked on
because you're a poet while you're doing it,
while you're working on it.
But it's not like being a financier or an orthodontist.
When you're not doing it, you feel like you're not it.
So the recent things matter.
I'll start with a poem that I chose
to make first in my selected poems a few books ago now.
This is the poem I chose to make first.
It's called "Rhyme."
A review I liked, a very favorable review of this book,
said, it's so like Robert Pinsky to write a poem called "Rhyme"
that doesn't rhyme.
[LAUGHTER]
It does.
It doesn't rhyme like it does that it was with fuzz,
but it is tongue, instrument, body, spirit, song, containment,
ready inheritance.
Anyway, not important.
"Rhyme."
Air an instrument of the tongue,
The tongue an instrument
Of the body, the body
An instrument of spirit,
The spirit a being of the air.
Each bird the medium of its song.
Each song a world, a containment
Like a hotel room, ready
For us guests who inherit
Our compartment of time there.
In the Joseph Cornell box, among
Ephemera as its element,
The preserved bird-- a study
In spontaneous elegy, the parrot
Art, mortal in its cornered sphere.
Each room a stanza rung
In a laddered filament
Clambered by all us unsteady
Chambered voices that share it,
Each one reciting I too was here--
I too was here
In a room, in a rhyme, in a song.
In the box, in books.
Each element
An instrument, the body
Still straining to parrot
The spirit, a being of the air.