Patricia Gray: Good evening, everyone. It's great to see you here. We've got some great poets reading tonight. Miranda Field will be the first poet to read. Her poetry delves into the natural world inhabited by frogs, crows, cranes and human animals. She fishes out secrets and views with a cool eye the secrets we like to hide just below the thin membrane of conscious consideration. When I heard her read at Bread Loaf in 2002, from her Bakeless Prize-winning book, "Swallow," her scintillating poems and tenacity in pursuit of their subject matter amazed me. In a poem such as "Subway," she doesn't turn away from a disturbing event, but looks at it from several angles until its full meaning is revealed. She often continues past the point most poets would stop, and the twists and turns that occur thereafter are what make her voice so strong, new and remarkable. There is glistening intellect in her work. Born and reared in London, Miranda is on the cusp of an interesting career. She received her undergraduate degree from the New School, and holds an M.F.A. degree in poetry from Vermont College. Her poems have won the "Discovery"/ "The Nation" Award and a Pushcart Prize. As a comment on the back of her book says, "'Swallow' swoops and darts, tangling the lines we draw between the wild and the cultivated." Please welcome Miranda Field. [ applause ] Miranda Field: Thank you so much. That was really a lovely introduction. Can everybody hear me? Wow, this is a good microphone. I'm a little intimidated here [ laughs ] . This is an amazing event for me. I'm very honored to be invited here. Thank you again. I'm honored to be reading with Jack Gilbert, and I will just do my best. I'm going to read a few poems from "Swallow" to start with, and then a few newer poems. I read some time, a poet writing about her process when she moved from one book to the next, that she would look through the poems and discover that she had repeated certain words or fields of images, and would not allow herself to use those again. "Moon" was one; she would not use "moon." Well, you know, "Swallow" is full of smoke and flames and fire, and I don't know if I'll ever get that out of my poems. The first poem I'm going to read is "Housefire." The first house I lived in as a child, lived in ever, was burned to the ground one night, and that's where this poem came from. Smoke still lingers in my current poems. "Housefire." The spark struck in secret under the stairs in dust in the cellar smolders the way a face does, and the life inside it, after a slap. A mortification, stains on the floor of a caged thing's cage. In dust in the cellar where our bicycles lean broken-antlered in the dark. Among molds in the cellar with a cat swollen with poison curls in the damp to extinguish herself. It's dark outside; inside the dark becomes particles a little like rain stilled. Behind chicken-wired glass the garden shakes a few dead leaves down. Most of winter's work is done, The pond lidded, the ruts of the bicycle's wheels cast in iron. The fire begins by itself, a breathing-life-into, a kindling: cells of our skin, soil from the garden; tinder for fire's insistence. The fire has been impatient to begin all along. The house is its accomplice. Roots of the black walnut hold tight the foundations, hence nothing grows here, nothing flourishes. But flames brush the root hairs, makes them stand on end. Like a story's ending, not quite to wake us is the fire's intention. To stroke us with its smoke, our sleeping faces. I'm one of four daughters. I grew up with a singer for a mother, and I think it was probably through her voice that I gained my own. Okay, good. Now I can see over it; cross-eyed [ unintelligible ] . Anyway, so I grew up with a singer for a mother. And I think when I wrote the poems in "Swallow," I was at a point in my life where I was maybe halfway between childhood and adulthood. And that came late for me, adulthood. As I read this poem over the years, I begin to understand this poem more from the mother's perspective; the artist's mother, struggling to continue to use her voice in a household filled with children. So this poem has shifted in its meaning to me, over the years. Still feel a little cross-eyed, okay. "Soloist." Above the wall, the sky is plaster-white. A voice climbs the wall. It disguises itself as creeper or vine, it falls like milk spilt over the edge of a table, the voice of the mother, climbing, falling, continuous. It goes on trailed by other sounds, not liquid at first, but electrical. By the voices of small dogs whose howls and quarrels rise like cinders, but roll over the lip of the wall and drip down, singed by cold stone. And the voices of children, not musical like the mother's, not sonorous, no more so than the animals'. But as idolatrous. The house has a black door set with jeweled glass. Jewels fall from the door when the door swings open and bangs shut. The missing jewels are buried in the grass, the holes healed with flimsier translucencies. How the world appears through the dissolution of the door's window is disordered, warped, underwater. Or as a wooded lot appears to one lost there. The children lean in unison against the glass to look. They know enough to stay. They know enough to know they need not push the door to let the mother out. Her singing passes through divided spaces like a mist. It rises like vapor in a still, then starts to fall, though now and then an errant note will lift itself above the wall. To follow it would be like tying a string to a bird- not to the acquisitive magpie swooping down to pluck a jewel from the mud. Some urgencies are tenured to the earth, its treasures. Some go farther. In the small town where I grew up in North London, on the outskirts of the city, there was a crazy lady, as we thought -- as I've called her before in introducing this poem, although I now feel much more empathy with her -- who dressed all in white, completely head to toe; white makeup, white hair, white shoes, lived in a white house. The grass around her house had been spray-painted white, and the trees had been painted white. She was known as the White Lady of Finchley; she believed herself to be an angel, it was said. And as I said, I've always introduced this poem and called her, you know, the town crazy, but I feel more and more empathy with this person who carefully created a world around herself, and carefully maintained it. And so this is for the White Lady. "As the Crow Flies, So Will it Fall" [ this version published in "AGNI Magazine," vol. 53; not "Swallow." ] By Sunday, say, or Monday. And a neighbor's brutish dog run carrying it off. To worry it all day. As if it were its own foot, wounded. The way the cat licks her kittens' salt-glazed pelts, the watery blood-flora on the bottom of the box. She eats the afterbirth, but not because its juices speak to her. No chatter while she chews what bulges from her body. It stains the spires of her teeth. Her coat is white all over. And the deluded Cora, "White Lady of London," takes her as daughter, and crows to her through dusk, "my little girl." All colorless dresses, stockings, shoes, hat, she rice-powders her face. She thinks herself archangel. But archangels aren't female. But fictional. But oblivious to this. She has a simple mind, a solid body. Her shopping basket bulges: white eggs, coupons, gizzards for her girl. But I who've also dreamed of transubstantiation keep my stones unthrown. As you keep your brain at its scatterpearl tasks. Your body on its short string. Then when your blood escapes you've let it go. Ruined your good white things. Cold brine might lighten the stain in a pail on the stoop, but leaves behind that rosy watermark. And it will float like fat in the soup on every white field in the drawer. Like night-time among the daylight things. But the mind creates its quarry. The heart origamis, folds in frogs and cranes and crows the flatness facing it. It aims its arrows, cuts an eye-hole, a stone's throw in the huge opaque. You shape your kill. And what you've known comes falling down. Falls far. Falls far from you. Wherever it will. And the last one from "Swallow" is sort of -- I think of it as the companion poem to that one. Not eat the thing you took. Not pluck its feathers, peel its skin. Not kiss your own face on the mouth imagining the tasting. Nor bury the thing you bring down from the sky. Not interpret the meaning of its cry. Not clothe the cooling thing in woolens. Not reel it in. Not wind it while it writhes. Not breathe hard while you work, not speak of it, not burrow in. But barely look upon the garden where the weight fell, sudden. Where the falling broke it open. The plummet stopped. Where rain falls down in dying angles and the damage blooms. Not touch the entry wound. Not stitch it up. Nor enter. Not with a finger. Not the Viking eye. Not wonder. But leave what be you took. But let what spills congeal. And wager everything you own the grass grows over it in time. It cannot rise again. The sky assists this with its rain. And the garden, and the mind. After "Swallow" I wrote -- I had a little burst of writing; I wrote some prose poems. I think I was trying to separate myself from "Swallow," and I wrote this poem; its title is "Break." In the middle of the hunt, I must excuse myself, and all through silent polished halls feel the dog-breath on my sling-back heels. Being flesh, being always hungry, I mostly swallow what is thrown. But am not glutton, but furnace burning punishments. And know the protocol for butchery, but cannot call it to my mind. In safety-orange vests my suitors stand, eyeing my diminishing, my diamonded neck. Offering payment, but wearied of the work's travails, the intricate entrails tangling. True, I, too, salivate for blood. In fact, some days I offer listeners lascivious travelogues: of inroads into bile undammed, and fat, and glossy sinew. And finish dewy. So cast no stones. But where I end up, washing hands with languorous time-inattentiveness, I hear horns, hooves, hounds. I stand bleached by gaseous light, and look a gutted thing myself, my makeup gone, my clothes a net of wind. And say to her who hangs, maturing, in the mirror, Well. We've been a-hunted. I'm the one. And other days the other. So what now do we offer? This next poem is in a strange voice. It kind of samples some of the rhythms and cadences of a 17th century poet, William Drummond. And he seemed the right voice to me to do this poem, which comes from a place of total delirium induced by endless nights of interrupted sleep and insomnia of early motherhood. [ laughter ] It's called "I Do Not Sleep, for Sleep is Like the Wind and Trees, Amazed." Not sleep for sleep is like the wind and trees amazed by sleep's persuasive gaze and germinates inside cicada cochlea- do not you sleep, do not you sleep?- then eats these hatchlings up, unseen. In glistening jelly themes hollower than Appalachian mines among pines, praise, applause, themes-my subtle worms-combine when moon a world-dividing language sings, above the hook-and-ladder's dipthonged, drunken, ruby fountain sounds . . . Such is my state, my stateless mind- widowed turtle, green mother in some shady grove, lost in her native tongue. And what ensued was a bunch of poems on the theme of sleeplessness and sleep potions, and so forth. This one is "Arnica/Absolution/Ambien." [ laughter ] No mortal ever learns to go to sleep definitively. No baby, animal or vegetable, intends to sink his vehicle in so soundless a lake. In such cloudy houses, shadows take the shape of something "put to sleep." Any oblivion is a field or maze a creature grazes in for private reasons. The edible flower taken from its bed to the table expires on your tongue, and this is what we mean by sense of night and utterly internal to itself. To go to sleep, I think of the bodies in their reservoirs, painstakingly changing from opaque to phosphorescent. How all the while distracted Nature pours a perfect solvent on their experiment. I take a half-pill, a paradigm ignites, a moving sign in rain. I take a whole, the flame grows lower. One and a quarter, it's just a flicker. No sense asking who I am then. Swinging from its dead twig in a bush, the aura-like cocoon, lit up by winter sun- the least of its worries the worm. And lastly from this group "Animal/Mineral Fable." [ The poem may differ from the poet's original format. ] Like a natural birth, a natural death is not for everyone. Often it takes too long, arrives too late, the participants shake, the sun engorges the room, the room expels the sun. Then there's the moon. Like natural birth and natural death, a natural sleep and natural wakefulness aren't for everyone. Often they're delayed, disrupted, damaged when they come. The moon neutrally divides and subdivides, the subject cries, then there's the sun. The last little group of poems I'm going to read tonight are part of a sequence I'm working on now. Each poem takes as its title a line from a collection of poems by the French-Lebanese poet, Vnus Khoury-Ghata; her book "Elle Dit" ("She Said"). These poems came after a very difficult time in my life; a complete loss of voice, about three years of not being able to write, and just a total loss of bearings -- artistic, maternal and human, and every kind of bearing you can imagine. And then I started to write again, and I think, perhaps, that speaking of myself in the third person helped me do that. These are short poems I'm going to read; eight or nine. And remember, each one of the titles is a line by Vnus Khoury-Ghata. I just don't want to not credit her for the line; those titles are the best part. Okay. [ This format may differ from the poet's original format. ] The marshes might have to be tied to the sea walls. She's awaiting public execution Or private publication when the bleeding begins. 'Rain, rain,' she says, 'go away,' As you'd moan to a fly or a droning child. But the symptoms increase. 'Are these signs or wonders?' she asks, As you'd query a doctor or commander. She bleeds dreams, and when she stops, That flood might drown her. She sponges their shadows off. The stains recede. She sleeps through summer storms, Glass needles stitch leaves to tiles. The roof rots a little. Early morning woodpeckers and human machines begin a vigil, Later crickets, but she sleeps. She perceives hands evolved to wings have cast a wicked spell over this gabled town. Having lain awake so long She now sleeps upside-down, But it exhausts her. The grass, children's eyes, the eyes of rabbits, Sometimes she dreamed foxes took them away. She left her young by the fence for foxes, Like love missives written in the blood of violets. Sometimes foxes stole them from their beds in dreams when she'd Changed her mind Like items scratched from lists by bleeding pens In the heat of kitchens. The wolves are former dogs, One day labor, one day no labor. On the day of labor she does nothing else, self-tamed. When everything's done she's like a domestic creature with no owner. The day of no labor begins like any other. "Please, will you sell me some ears of another species?'" She's like a domestic creature missing its owner, You know, those faithful ones who pen themselves in cemeteries. Anyway, it's not a question of winters or summers. They hover around her Bleeding again, Another after-effect of those back-to-back pangs. She bleeds up steps and down the narrow tubes of telephones. Soon after birth begins this crossing swords, crossing swords. Now she cries, kshing, kshing, And bleeds through several layers in an hour. Like hummingbirds Sewed into a shroud, her book, A more arousing odor under the odor of ink In the leaf pile. She assumed the leaves were raked leaves, not loose-leaf, But among her reasons for burning things, What specifically she burned hardly belonged. Leaves had been substituted for her shoes Since this commitment. Lips and ears and other valves and flaps Had metamorphosed into leathery leaves. Children stuck with saliva to the undersides of leaves. So many dried decaying leaves choked her book. She'd found her life's work, From now on shaking leaves out to make smoke. She searches for the visible part of her dream. She'd said, 'I desire,' But it was kept in the attic with set-aside things. Flies held the rafters, wing panes reflecting permanent evening. Someone said, 'Lucky to have so many spiders,' And if air were glass, her flashlight tangled in the cracks. In August when her abdomen had swollen several sizes, She kept pushing that single conceit. It kept bumping against her sea-gate, Its head one big blood blister after endless hours. Slowly it dawned on her, she'd mother no bleeders. She'd hemorrhaged that lineage. "Now that I have crossed the prairie." Describing herself moving through rooms, She crosses unfinished floors, she touches Paper melons, a human-made spider web, Baby teeth. She stacks sheets and sheets of long division problems. "Oh, now I'm doing housework," she exclaims in a dream. The bone beads chatter in the rungs of the web, But the dream is pre-verbal. She understands straight in this room, But can't draw lines. She staples sheets and sheets and sheets to beds, Insects eat the sheets. Pursuing insects, she fearlessly begins creeping through nests, Collecting eggs in her hair. Some confuse jam and glue, Then make the flight to human feeling glibly. And lastly, Her voice comes back to her from the canary's cage. Sometimes a poem grows on the side of another, Like a teratoma, A twin interjected. Sometimes a whole tooth comes Embedded in the tissue, and a little hair. Once one came with a vestigial wing, A freak fixture. But it twitched. Thank you. [ applause ] Patricia Gray: Whew. Jack Gilbert's book, "Refusing Heaven," published in 2005, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. And his chapbook, "Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh," was published in limited edition this year by Pond Road Press, a Washington, D.C. literary publisher. We have both of these books outside, and we have Miranda's "Swallow" outside, too. We're lucky that Jack Gilbert has agreed to read tonight, because he doesn't give many readings. His poems are spare, pure and intriguing. He wrestles with philosophical questions as easily as he describes the small pleasures of the everyday. "The soul is ambitious for what is invisible," he says in his poem. And in "Beyond Pleasure," he considers the reasons for poetry. "Poetry fishes us to find a world part by part, as the photograph, as the photograph interprets the flux to give us time to see each thing separate and enough." In any given poem, Jack Gilbert can -- and often does -- hold time still long enough for us to glimpse the invisible. And for that, readers are continually grateful. Born in Pittsburgh, Jack's latest book [ laughs ] -- Jack, who was born in Pittsburgh, has poems in his latest book about that city. He received a B.A. degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and attended Berkeley and received an M.A. from San Francisco State in 1962, the year he won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He has taught at several universities and has a large and loyal following. From this -- over the years his poems have often had to do with three women he has loved; you will likely hear about them tonight. I marked this up, so that's what's going on here. [ Laughs ] What he has done is, in his early days -- from his early days in San Francisco he traveled to more than 15 countries for the State Department, and now he lives an often solitary life in Massachusetts. His books have twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and one is apt to be again, I think. Maybe it has been. Anyway, Jack Gilbert. [ applause ] Jack Gilbert: [ "Refusing Heaven" ] Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise, this morning before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so remarkably well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. if we deny our happiness, resist satisfaction, We lessen the importance of then deprivation. We must risk delight. We can live without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept for gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord's running us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit [ train noise in background ] It's appropriate. [ laughter ] If the locomotive -- [ laughter ] I have no [ unintelligible ] . [ He repeats the previous two lines of the poem. ] If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking out over the sleepy island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafs and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are things still to come. "On Growing [ Old in San Francisco ] " Two girls barefoot walking in the rain Both girls lovely, one of them is sane Hurting me softly Hurting me though Two girls barefoot walking in the snow Walking in the white snow Walking in the black Two girls barefoot never coming back. "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, got it wrong -- It's so hard. How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan I give up. Linda, would you come and read my poems? Female Speaker: Maybe you could try just a little bit more. Jack Gilbert: Okay. How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds. "Walking Home Across the Island" Walking home across the plain in the dark. And Linda's crying. Again we have come to a place where I rail and she suffers and the moon does not rise. We have only each other, but I am shouting inside the rain and she is crying like a wounded animal, knowing there is no place to turn. It is hard to understand how we could be brought down by love. "Pewter." Pewter is one of two elements -- one of the only ones that expand when they are heated. "Pewter." Thrushes flying under the lake. Nightingales singing underground. Yes, my King. Paris hungry and leisurely just after the war. Yes. Those silent winter afternoons along the Seine when I was always alone. Yes, my King. Rain everywhere in the forests of Pennsylvania as the king's coach lumbers and they were caught and stood gathered close while the black trees went on and on, my King. It was the sweet thing of our lives, the rain shining on our faces - the rain shining on our faces, the long [ unintelligible ] sound of rain around. Like the night we waited, knowing she was probably warm and moaning under someone else. That cold mansard looking out over the huge hospital of the poor and far down on Paris gray and beautiful under the February rain. Between that and this; [ unintelligible ] and [ unintelligible ] ; between, my King, that forgotten girl, forgotten pain, and the consequence those lovely long ago night bells that I did not notice, more and more apparent in me, like pewter expanding as it cools, yes, like a king halted in the great forests of Pennsylvania. Like me singing these prison songs to praise the gray, to praise her, to tell of me, yes, and of me, my King. It really says, Like me singing these prison songs to praise the gray, Like me singing these prison songs to praise the gray, to praise her, to tell of me, yes, and of me -- Hmm. I wrote it down wrong. To praise her, to tell of me, yes, and of you, my King. To praise her, to tell of me, and of you, my King. "Duende" I can't remember her name. It's not as though I've been in bed with that many women. The truth is I cannot remember her face. I kind of how strong her thighs were, and her beauty. But what I won't forget is the way she opened the barbecued chicken with her hands, and wiped the grease on her breasts. [ "Finding Something" ] I say moon is horses in the tempered dark, because horses is the closest I can get to it. I sit on the terrace of this worn villa the king's telegrapher built on the mountain that looks down on a blue sea and the small white ferry that crosses slowly to the next island each noon. Michiko is dying in the house behind me, the long windows opened so I can hear the faint sound she will make when she wants watermelon to suck or so I can take her to the bucket in the corner of the high-ceilinged room which is the best we can do for a chamber pot. She will lean against my leg as she sits so as not to fall over in her weakness. How strange and fine to get so near to it. The arches of her feet are like voices of children calling in the grove of lemon trees, where my heart is as helpless as crushed birds. A couple more, then you'll be freed from this. [ laughter ] "Bring in the Gods." This is the last one. Bring in the gods, I say, and he goes out. When he comes back and I know they are with him, I say, Put tables in front of them so they may be seated, and food upon the tables so they may eat. When they have eaten, I ask which of them will question me. Let him hold up his hand, I say. The one on the left raises his hand I tell him to ask. Where are you now, he says. I stand on top of myself, I hear myself answer. I stand on myself like a hilltop and my life is spread before me. Does it surprise you, he asks. I explain that in our youth and for a long time after our youth we cannot see our lives. Because we can see no shape to it, since we have nothing to compare it to. We have not seen it grow and change because we are too close. We don't know the names of things that would bind them to us, so we cannot feed on them. One near the middle asks why not. Because we don't have the knack for eating what we are living. Why is that? she asks. Because we are too much in a hurry. Where are you now? the one on left says. With the ghosts. I am with Gianna those two years in Perugia. Meeting secretly in the thirteenth-century alleys of stone. Walking in the fields through the spring light, she well dressed and walking in heels over the plowed land. We are just outside the city walls hidden under the thorny blackberry bushes and her breasts naked. I am with her those many twilights in the olive orchards, holding the heart of her as she whimpers. Now where are you? he says. I am with Linda those years and years. In American cities, in Copenhagen, on Greek islands season after season. Lindos and Monolithos and the other places. I am with Michiko for eleven years, East and West, holding her clear in my mind the way a native can hold all of his village at one moment. Where are you now? he says. I am standing on myself the way a bird sits in her nest, with the babies half asleep underneath and the world all leaves and morning air. What do you want? a blonde one asks. To keep what I already have, I say. You ask too much, he says sternly. Then you are at peace, she says. I am not at peace, I tell her. I want to fail. I am hungry for what I am becoming. What will you do? she asks. I will continue north, carrying the past in my arms, flying into winter. [ laughter ] [ applause ] [ end of transcript ] ?? ?? ?? ??