It's a particular delight to hear and to read
with Alicia Ostriker.
We have been friends forever, even if it's only
her digital presence.
Alicia and I were born the same year, 1937,
into the rise of fascism in Europe.
What's happening here is a heartbreaking deja vu for us.
The last generation dying off now
with a living memory of World War II and the horrors
unleashed by a dictator with a mad doctrine of a master race.
I think we are all trying to keep our heads just now and keep
our sympathies alive.
I was thinking Cynthia mentioned Tony Hoagland.
I always like to mention Tony.
In a poem of his that he published--
I'm going off my script.
[LAUGHTER]
Actually, his wife published it posthumously.
It's a poem called "The Gorgons."
The world history is the gorgon.
And Tony ends the poem by saying,
"your job is to keep looking, take notes,
and not turn to stone"
And I think poetry helps us with that.
And also, in a time when the connection between language
and meaning has been torn, and torn purposely,
poetry has a way of calling things by the right name.
So in memory of the recent victims of ICE,
the poet Renee Good and the ICU nurse Alex Pretti,
killed out of concern for their neighbors,
in memory of those survivors clinging to the boat off
the coast of Venezuela, in memory of those whose names we
don't know, I'd like to begin with a poem by Robert Frost,
because it seems written for us, for this moment, "Fire and Ice."
Some say the world will end in fire.
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
[APPLAUSE]
Robert.
You'll find a bust of him out there
in the front of the Poetry Center.
You get to be turned to stone, right, Robert?