James Billington: It's a great pleasure to, as the Librarian
of Congress, to welcome you to the presentation
of the 2006 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry.
Just checking to make sure that I have this in my pocket.
The prize recognizes the most distinguished book of poetry
by an American author published in the last two years
and carries an award of $10,000.
This is the ninth time that the Library
of Congress has awarded this prestigious biannual award.
Prior winners are B.H. Fairchild, Alice Fulton, David Ferry,
Frank Bidart, Kenneth Koch, A.R. Ammons, Louise Glck and Mark Strand
in the same year and James Merrill.
Tonight's prize recognizes the winning book published during the
years 2004 to 2006.
There are a couple more seats up front here if you're...anyhow,
it's Present Company that's the title, by W.S. Merwin.
We're indebted to the jurors that devoted so much of their time
to reading the multitude of submissions sent by the publishers.
The jurors are Dr. Betty Sue Flowers,
President of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library
in Austin, who is with us tonight.
Betty why don't you take a bow for those who we've, this is a lot of --
[applause] Thank you very much.
She's come the second furthest distance.
Mr. Merwin has come all the way from Hawaii, so -- [applause] --
which is we really appreciate it.
Anyhow, I should mention also that the other jurors were poet
and essayist Sharon Santos, who was unable to join us this evening.
And I wish also to acknowledge the late Leon Rector,
who served as a juror until his untimely death
in August of this past year.
So my thanks to all the jurors
for their work selecting the prizewinning book.
I'd also like to acknowledge the publisher of this year's winner,
Copper Canyon Press of Port Townsend in Washington state.
And most especially, I want to thank Phillip C. Bobbitt,
Dr. Phillip C. Bobbitt for his generous gift
which makes this prize possible.
Dr. Bobbitt is the A.W. Walker Centennial Chair in the School
of Law at the University of Texas in Austin.
Author of several books on constitutional law,
international security and the history of strategy,
including the recent work The Shield of Achilles: War,
Peace and the Course of History.
Nobody could ever accuse Phil Bobbitt of neglecting big questions.
[laughter] So it's a great honor and privilege to have him also,
for coming quite a great distance and with our eternal gratitude
for this important prize.
So please welcome and I'm happy to turn the floor over to Dr. Bobbitt.
[applause] Dr. Bobbitt: As Jim said,
the first Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry was given
by the Library of Congress to James Merrill
for his work The Inner Room 19 years ago.
Since then, Becky's have gone to so distinguished a list,
that Robert Pinsky, three-time Poet Laureate proclaimed that,
"No other literary prize has set such a high standard."
This year's winner, W.S. Merwin,
rightly joins this remarkable collegian.
It may strike some as a strange time to give awards for poetry.
Our troops and civilians are being attacked in distant theaters
and we may think that the only medals the state should be handing
out ought to go for gallantry in combat.
But thankfully, we can honor those in different roles who are trying
to secure our future and the future of those
for whom we have taken responsibility.
But this raises two awkward questions.
The first question is.
Should the poetry the state chooses to honor --
this is the only prize for poetry specifically given
by the American nation.
Should that poetry be connected to the acts and purposes of the state?
In the late 1980s when this prize was first being established,
I would have said no.
That's because we were endeavoring to reestablish a prize
that had been discontinued by Congress when the Library
of Congress awarded the prize to Ezra Pound.
Indeed, the prize had been given to Pound for his book,
The Pisan Cantos, so named for the prisoner of war camp at Pisa,
where Pound was interred for his fascist activities in World War II.
So I argued, for a decade before that,
that we must not apply a political test
to the award of honors in the arts.
To do otherwise would suggest that the basis of our state -
it's commitment to the protection of human rights, was in doubt.
In fact, that it was doubted by the very officials
to whom its fate had been committed.
Only a very fearful Congress would prevent a war to honor those
who might disagree with the government's policies.
In the last 19 years, I have come to doubt some aspects of this argument.
Partly that's because it seems to imply that we should tolerate awards
to poets and artists because they don't really threaten our
public policies.
When in fact, the power of the arts has probably never been greater,
nor have we never ever, ever been quite so much in need.
Mainly, however, my argument though, not my conclusion,
which gives the prize, my arguments suggest a disconnect
between the endeavors of the artist and those of other citizens.
He describes a landscape of cultural enclaves,
without much connection to one another.
I don't mean that everything is politics.
Heavens! And I don't mean that everything is poetry.
Alas. I believe that each is its own modality of coping
with the human condition.
But I also mean the arts can and inevitably will reflect
and influence life in a democracy.
And as far from a disconnect so that we may protect the arts
from interference by public bodies, there is a vital umbilical cord
that gives life to our convictions.
The seeds are born and as they develop in both poetry and politics.
And that we must accord respect to persons and their achievements
in politics as well as in poetry,
even when we don't particularly share their views of either.
My parents did not exult either poetry or politics.
But they were keenly interested in both.
To a great extent, they were interested in each other
and their immediate and their extended family.
They were not legislators, unacknowledged or otherwise.
But out of their love for each other came this legacy and this prize.
For the last almost 20 years, it's been my great joy to say something
at these gatherings about my family, especially about my mother,
in whose honor this prize is presented.
Becky Johnson of Johnson City.
There she was when she met my father here at the Library
of Congress in the 1930s.
They were married a few years later, having eloped in Mexico.
They lived together mainly in Texas
for about 40 years until my mother's death.
When she died, I found a cache of some unusual index cards
in a pigeon hole in her green writing desk.
Each card had a hole drilled in the top of it.
I'll show a picture of that.
And on each was written a fragment of poetry or a lofty saying.
I took this stack to my father and I said, "What are all these cards?"
And he said, "Well, you remember that I met your mother
at the Library of Congress
when we were both students working our way though school."
My father had won a scholarship to come east to college from Texas.
It was the middle of the Depression.
My mother was studying Library Science, as it was called then.
My father said to me, "You know that your mother was engaged
to another man when we first met?"
Well, yes, I sort of remembered that.
"Well, I had to dislodge this fellow."
[laughter] "But the only time I saw your mother was at work
and we had a very strict supervisor.
We worked in cataloguing.
These cards are from the card catalogue.
You see, actually the holes were at the bottom not the top
but at first we would exchange notes as if we were typing
in reference information."
[laughter] Well, I have to say since I've heard that story,
I've had sort of an affection for Librarians.
[laughter] My father and I sat and we talked and out
of that conversation came this prize.
The first prize was given in 1990, recognizing books published
in the preceding two years.
It was the same mission statement as the original prize
that was suspended in 1949.
Next year with the 10th prize, this will be the culmination
of 20 years of this recognition.
But tonight is an awkward 19.
What can anyone say about 19?
Well, when my mother was 19, she graduated from college.
It was she who was then absconded to teach her brother, Lydon's,
classes with his father, my grandfather,
got him a job as assistant to a congressman.
Nineteen years later, I was born
and my parents' lives were decisively shifted to Texas away
from Washington which had drawn them together
and where they had so many friends.
When she'd been married 19 years, she and I drove
to Washington for a holiday.
We spent a summer touring Civil War battlefields.
That was my idea.
And we ended up at the 21 Club in New York.
That was her idea.
[laughter] When I was 19 my parents came to visit me in Los Angeles.
I left Princeton.
I was working a very poor area of L.A. They were staying
at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
And so I drove my MGT --
do you remember the ones with the large headlights?
I drove that down to this very posh area.
Eva Gabor was giving them an anniversary party that night.
But I insisted on dragging my parents down to see my car
which I was very proud and giving her a spin around the block.
Mother was dressed to the nines, but she gamely went along.
As we went around a corner I put the windscreen
down to give her a better feel for the road, I told her.
[laughter] And I heard a slight cry.
When we got back to the hotel,
she said that the wind had blown her false eyelashes off.
[laughter] Nineteen years after that trip to the south,
it ended up at the 21 Club.
I kissed her goodbye.
That night she died.
Too young.
Now she would have enjoyed that evening more than anyone else here.
Nineteen is an ungainly year.
It's one year after you can be drafted, when we had a draft,
and still one year away from ceasing being a teenager.
One year early and as with this ceremony, one year late.
But that means 20 is only a few months away.
And I can invite you all back here for the 2008 prize
and the next Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry.
This is the first time the prize has been given on Halloween.
[laughter] I must say that Halloween is my least favorite of holidays.
This arises, I think, from my childhood experience
with the whole scene of dressing up in ridiculous outfits
and knocking on strange doors.
But as usual my experience, largely due to my mother,
was a bit different from most.
We lived on a leafy street in a university town
and each year instead of collecting candy, I was dispatched
to make the rounds collecting money for UNICEF.
[laughter] The United Nations International Children's
Education Fund.
This wasn't all that easy in Texas in the 1950s.
[laughter] Even in the relatively liberal Austin.
Some persons didn't care for the U.N.
and others just didn't appreciate the ruse
by which a child was insinuated into their house,
past their front door to extort cash.
I also took checks.
[laughter] My mother would wait in the car as I trolled for donations
after a few years of this, however,
she hit upon a more successful tactic.
Instead of ending the evening in our small neighborhood, we would drive
to the fraternity houses -- [laughter] --
on campus where the Halloween parties were well underway.
Again I would be sent up to the door
in some outlandish parodical costume.
But if I could manage my way to talk into the party,
UNICEF would hit the jackpot.
[laughter] Hoisted up on the shoulders of some fraternity guys,
the members were quite eager
to demonstrate their generosity before their dates,
the sorority girls gave me kisses.
Nobody knew what UNICEF was.
[laughter] And by the end of the night,
a tidy sum could be collected.
This was characteristic of my parents.
High ideals and good parties.
[laughter] So unexpectedly I now find myself another Halloween.
But instead of the slightly menacing trick-or-treat,
I'm here to just offer a treat.
The special treat of hearing Bill Merwin read his enchanting poetry.
[applause] Bill Merwin: Thank you Phil.
That was eloquent, wonderful and very surprising.
I learned all sorts of things I had no idea about.
And I'd forgotten that the first prize
of the current series was Jimmy Merrill, whom I miss dearly.
He was a lifelong friend.
Wonderful, wonderful poet and what a marvelous roster
of poets that have been in that.
I have been thinking about your quandary about Pound
and all the controversy that came from it.
I remember the controversy at the time.
All my life, I have tried to come to terms with my feelings about Pound
and about his poetry and about that question itself.
I don't know that there's a neat answer.
I think that everybody must arrive
at each one's own answer to that one.
I can't believe that there can be any formulaic answer
to or legal answer to it.
There's always a contradiction between our ideals and our behavior
and between what we admire and what we accept and it has to be that way.
I think every poet who has followed is indebted to Pound
in the English language because not
of his politics but of his great ear.
He was a hero of mine when I was in college.
I fortunately knew nothing about his politics and as I began
to hear rumors I didn't want to know about them and I kept them away
as long as I could because he represented
to me something extremely important and he did it through poetry,
not through propaganda of any kind.
He did it through that amazing ear that's there
in The Pisan Cantos too.
He represented something very rare in my youth.
Young American, I've seen the house he was born in, in Idaho.
Came from a very humble background, farming, middle-class,
lower middle-class people.
Who decided very early that he was going to be a poet.
He was an egomaniac, too all his life, which helped him, probably.
[laughter] But there weren't many examples
of that in contemporary America.
There were some examples in 19th Century America,
but that was as far back as the Middle Ages for most of this.
And so Pound was very important.
This is what I wanted to do;
from the time I was 16, I wanted to be a poet.
And I needed examples.
So I came to see him when I was 18; came to see him here in Washington.
And he took me seriously.
And he said some things that helped me for many years
and I'm indebted to him for that too.
He said, "If you want to be a poet you've got to take it serious
and work at it all the time.
And you have to keep your ear open and listen all the time."
Those are very important things.
Then he sent me postcards for years, some years.
Some of them just had little scrolls on them.
One of my most memorable of all was one
that said, "Read seeds, not twigs.
E.P." [laughter] Pretty good.
But when I read afterwards that Yeats and he holed
up in Stone Cottage for several winters and worked together
at the same time, I thought, "God, how could Yeats stand it?"
[laughter] I mean, Pound was, as Gertrude Stein said,
a village explainer, which was okay if you were a village
and if not, not [laughs].
[laughter] But anyway, the behavior, the anti-Semitism, the racism,
the fascism, whatever it amounted to it's just nonsense
as you read those books the economics and the politics.
But they are vicious nonsense
and it took him a long time to get past them.
Because he was troubled, and it this must be said in his favor,
he was troubled by them just
as everybody else was in his later years.
And so tried not to say anything anymore,
which is another kind of extreme.
But he's -- I've talked so long about him because he's so important
at the beginning of this roster of poets that you're talking about.
I don't even know how to begin
to thank the people I should be thanking.
I never met any member of your family who is responsible
for this prize and I'm happy to have any connection with them.
I admire so many things that I have heard about them and the roster
of poets to whom you've given the prize is indeed a very,
very high standard and one that I'm honored to be part of
and I'm very honored to be here.
And thank everybody who's involved in my being here.
I want to read from The Present Company and if there's time,
I would like to then bracket that reading
with a very few earlier poems, which have to do, really,
with what Phil was saying about the connection
between poetry and history.
The history of the poet's life, what's been going on it.
You know there have been generations and there have been many poets
and there have been critics and there have been literary historians
who have dismissed that subject, saying, "Poetry
and the arts have really nothing to do with the history of their time."
Which to me is absolute nonsense.
How can poetry be divorced from experience?
My impatience with the post-phenomenonologists
and with the whole generation
of French criticism of the post-war period.
It has to do with the attempt to cut the arts off
from the their subject matter.
The subject matter is raw experience itself.
Which means our confusion and our sufferings, our confusion,
things we don't know the answers to.
I believe that language comes out of what trying
to say what cannot be said and I believe poetry remains right there.
Prose goes on with the idea that it can say things
about the subject and it's right.
But poetry remains where you can't say it.
Where it cannot be said.
I mean you cannot say anything about real grief
or real love or real anger.
These are the things that defy words.
And that's what poetry...that's why people turn to poetry to write it
and to listen to it and to remember it.
The poems in The Present Company are related in one respect,
they're all in the second person and they are --
I realize that I've had a predilection to doing and,
of course, once you start a number of them, people say they're odes.
I suppose they're odes.
I mean I don't quite know what that is.
Odes are second person poems and one thinks of the Odes of Horace
and the "Odes de Sentimentales" of Pablo Neruda,
which these have been compared with.
I didn't have them in mind.
I had in mind was, first of all, I wanted them to be unlikely.
I wanted them to be improbable.
And they arose out of the poem, the first one that I'm going to read
to you, out of a phrase that we've all heard.
Do you remember flying in airplanes and being told over the loudspeaker,
"in the unlikely event of a water landing?"
[laughter] Well, I've began to wonder about this unlikely event.
And I thought, what makes an event unlikely?
It just means that it hasn't happened yet.
[laughter] To the unlikely event.
I'm not used to wearing glasses so I can't ever find
out which is the right pair for any job and I can never find it
when I do know which one it is.
Ah, which one is it?
There. "To the Unlikely Event": "You have been evoked so often
like some relative in office who we have heard
of by name all these years, but have never met.
You inhabit a kind of fame.
A void without time or senses.
Beyond anything said of you.
So that doubtless you do not hear the recurring inadequate references
to you which rise from another age rehearsing wrong images
or none at all.
And whenever you may arrive at last for a visit you come
in pure innocence and too late to be recognized once you are here.
Sudden drop in the dials in the light or the affections.
Windfall, a surprise legacy.
But once you come, you do not go.
How can we ever address you
in your unlikely would boundless indifference
to broaden your uncharted self
to which only random syllables find a way?
And to what words can we entrust our groundless hopes saying there,
there to them?
How unlikely we sound.
Already as though this might be the mission you were conceived for,
it could be what you always meant.
And the hope itself would return
at the last minute to put it into words.
What is there to say that seems even possible?
May it go on just as it is.
May that day never come.
May it be spring in the morning together and without end.
How unlikely it sounds when we come to say it.
It does not help much to recall how unlikely it is that we turned
up here with the beginnings thrown us out of which we know nothing,
hear nothing, remember only the moment before us which we believe
as it happens when it appears to be likely.
O beyond likely forever."
There were no other particular rules that, you know,
about what the poems had to be like.
So for example, here's a quite different one.
"To My Teeth."
So the companions of Ulysses those that were still with him
after the nights in the horse the sea lanes the other islands the
friends lost one by one in pain and the coming home one by one,
one bare day to a later age that was their own
but with their scars now upon them and now darkened and worn
and some broken beyond recognition
and still missing the ones taken away from beside them who had grown
up with them and served long without question wanting nothing else sat
around in the old places across from the hollows reminding themselves
that they were the lucky ones together
where they belonged but would he stay there?
[laughter] "To the Soul."
Is anyone there?
If so are you real?
Either way, are you one or several?
If the latter, are you all at once or do you take turns not answering?
Is you're the answer the question itself,
surviving the asking with aid?
Whose question is it?
How does it begin?
Where does it come from?
How did it ever find out about you?
Over the sound of itself with nothing
but its own ignorance to go by.
The poems change as you may or may not hear.
It may or may not be of an interest to you, but they do.
And this is a short one called "To This May:" They know
so much more now about the heart we are told.
But the world still seems to come one at a time.
One day, one year, one season.
And here it is spring once more with its birds nesting
in the holes in the walls.
Its morning finding the first time.
Its light pretending not to woo.
Always beginning as it goes.
"To the Knife:" You were what made us cry in the light to start with.
We could see you were there and we saw what you were.
We were hiding from you.
And would have been happy to go on with the dream
that you could not find us.
Cold flame, sight without eyes.
Line where both shores, the seen with the unseen come
down into nothing to pass between, to separate, to open,
to divide what had been once from what once it had been.
To tell apart, bringing always the touch of the present.
Of the great of you flares up far ahead of you and the memory
of you lingers and goes on burning ahead of you.
We plead with you who have no ears for us.
We beg in private and in vain, do not see us at all, ever.
We are not here.
Or if you see us, do not touch us wherever you were going to touch us.
Or if you do touch us, divide us from something it would be good
to lose and save us for ourselves.
"To My Brother."
My mother wrote to you before you were born.
A note you might open at some later date in case she should not be there
to tell you what was in her mind about wanting you
when she had not seen you.
That was before my time and it never turned out like that.
You never saw the letter and she never saw you.
Born perfect, they said, and dead within minutes, that far ahead of me
and always looking the other way.
And I would be the one to open the letter after she was gone.
And you had answered it without a word.
Before I was there to find out about you.
Unseen other, you perfect one, first born.
There were, after September the 11th and the World Trade Center,
an occasion which, by the way,
I seem to be in a rearguard action not to call 911 or 9/11.
I just hate sort of having a television nickname for something
that deserves some kind of acknowledgement,
maybe an awkward one, for what happened.
Anyway, I was out of the country and I was stunned as everyone else was,
but I wasn't expecting to write anything about it.
And I kept waking up in the mornings after several days passed
with beginnings of poems in my head.
And the first one was this one.
"To the Words."
When it happened you were not there.
Oh you were beyond the numbers, beyond recollection,
passed on from breath to breath.
Given again from day to day, from age to age.
Charged with knowledge, knowing nothing.
Indifferent elders, indispensable and sleepless,
keepers of our names before ever we came to be called by them.
You that were formed to begin with, you that were cried out,
you that were spoken to begin with to say what could not be said.
Ancient, precious and helpless ones.
Say it. This is another of these poems on this time.
It's called "To Ashes."
All the green trees bring their rings to you.
The widening circles of their years to you late and sown casting
down their crowns into you.
And once they are gone not to appear as themselves again.
Oh session of your own.
From whom now even the fire has moved on out
of the green voices of the days of summer.
Out of the spoken names of the words between them.
The mingled nights, the hands, the hope, the faces.
Those circling ages dancing in flames as we see now afterwards.
Here before you.
Oh, you with no beginning that we can conceive of.
No end that we can foresee.
You of whom once we were made.
Before we knew ourselves in this season of our own.
I apologize.
There's one word I got wrong.
I said "session" up there and it was "season," "Oh season of your own."
You don't want me to read that over again, I'm sure.
[laughter] But the strangest of the poems that came out of that time --
there was a great Polish poet who was a friend of mine.
He was a near contemporary, Czeslaw Milosz,
who just died a couple of years ago.
And Czeslaw did the first translation
of Zbigniew Herbert's poems into English, or he collaborated
on them, on the translations.
And Herbert was a wonderful, wonderful poet;
and a wonderful man, wonderful essayist.
The last time I saw Zbigniew was in Europe
and we were both playing hooky from a lecture and sitting it
out on the stairs somewhere.
And I saw this fat figure across the lobby and jumped up
and we threw our arms around each other
and I said, "Zbigniew, how are you?"
He said, "Drinking myself to death" he said.
[laughter] Unfortunately, that's just what happened.
But he's a great poet and I commend you to his poems if you are.
But I suddenly woke up one morning wanting to write a poem
to Zbigniew Herbert's bicycle.
Now the idea of Zbigniew Herbert ever being on a bicycle is
so ludicrous if you knew him, he was shaped kind of like a ball.
And he obviously couldn't have, you know, he was so uncoordinated --
[laughter] "Zbigniew Herbert's Bicycle:"
Since he never really possessed you,
however he may have longed to in secret.
So that in dreams he knew each surface and detail of you.
Gleam of spokes of chrome, smell of grease and rubber.
The chains black knuckles.
Day by day you remained out of sight so that he never had to lock you up
or hide you because nobody could see you.
And though he never in fact learned how to ride you,
keeping his round toppling weight upright on the too small toes
of waters slipping out from under.
Once he was well away, hands on the grips,
feet off the ground you could take him anywhere.
At last, like the rain through the rain.
Invisible as you were.
"To the Gods:" When did you stop telling us what we could believe?
When did you take that one step, only one, above all that?
As once you stepped out of each of the stories about you one
after the other and out of whatever we imagined we knew of you.
Who were the light to begin with and all of the darkness at the same time
and the voice in them calling, crying,
and the enormous answer neither coming nor going,
but too fast to hear.
You let us believe the names for you whenever we heard them.
You let us believe the stories.
How death came to be.
How the light happened.
How the beginning began.
You let us believe all that.
Then you let us believe that we had invented you.
That we no longer believed in you.
That you were only stories that we did not believe.
You with no moment for beginning, no place to end.
One step above all that.
Listen to us.
Wait -- believe in us.
"To the Afterlife:" The way we talk before those we tell ourselves do
not hear us.
Is that really the way we talk the rest of the time?
How can we ever be sure of it once we start listening to ourselves,
as we do when we talk in front of you?
And when are you not there?
How old you must be, who do not sleep and never meet our eyes,
though you were never out of them.
You who were not born.
If you do not hear us we can ask anything of you.
Listen. Now in the still night, the sound of breathing, remembering,
whether you hear it or not.
I found in the beam of a garden house a shape of moss and realized
that it was a wren's nest.
And then I watched the wren come and go and I heard the babies hatch
and I watched the day when the wren guided the babies all the way down.
Each one, one by one, and got them back into the woods the day
that they started to fly.
And of course, I would never touch that until it fell down by itself.
"To the Moss:" How you came all to know all that you are sure of.
How you discovered the darkness of green uncurling into the daylight
out of its origins unsounded as your own.
How you learned to fashion shapes of water into softness itself
that stayed in place and kept some secret of caves wherever you were
but with such welcome seemed to rise that in time you became,
as some believe, a model for the cheek and then the breast.
The wren felt she knew most of that before there were breasts or cheeks.
And she made out of living bits of you the globe of her nest as though
that was what you were grown there for.
I think it behooves us to remember a very simple thing
that we tend to forget.
Almost all of the living world is vastly older than we are.
And in a moment of great grief some years ago when I was in France,
I went back and went to all of the paleolithic caves
that I had not seen, some of which had been discovered
in the last few years since I had been seeing the caves.
And came to believe, I bet I read all of the stuff
that has been published about the caves, that have been published
in the intervening years.
And I realized, you know, that the paleontologists are very learned
men, but they don't know anything.
They really don't.
And if they did, the theories wouldn't change totally
from generation to generation.
They make it all up, you know.
[laughter] They make up a whole different theory so I --
you know, a poet might just as well have as good
as theory as any of them.
And I've got my own feeling, which comes from feelings about this
and from the fact that we're shown the great, you know, Lasko.
The great hall in Lasko.
Well, that was an initiation chamber.
And that was, you know, people came in and they had ceremonies in there.
But many of the great works in those caves are not art at all.
They're not for anyone to see.
They're some other connection that, you know, and the arrival
of being able to find one's way half a mile or a mile in the cold
with nothing to eat and nothing to drink and a light
that probably was not going to last you the whole way
and not knowing what you might else find in the cave too.
To find the shapes in the wall and decide that here, and maybe climb
up 25 feet, you know, in a fissure and do a drawing.
Always of a hoofed animal.
There are a few bears and things in there
but they are almost entirely hoofed animals.
I came to the conclusion that what it's all
about is the gesture of following.
Following the elders, following the elders in life that know more
about where they are going than we do.
And of course humans have been following hoofed animals
from the very beginning out of Africa.
And the hoofed animals knew something that they didn't know.
And they always felt that.
And I believe that.
And of course then they realize that the hoofed animals are in themselves
and the selves that they are looking for are in the wool
and there's no separation.
They come out knowing that in a way they're never going to forget.
I believe -- that's my theory about the paleolithic caves.
Why did I bring that up?
[laughter] It did have to do
with something I was going to read in here.
Yes, this is one called "To the Unfinished."
One of the great, you could say it sometimes
if you are being very pessimistic about the present.
Is there anything that can be said for the present?
Yes. We don't know how it ends.
The present is not finished.
The past we can study it in a way and we believe,
we can believe we can find out all about it, which is nonsense, too,
but at least it's finished.
Nothing else is going to happen there.
It stays put.
But the present is a complete mystery all
around us all the time; it's unfinished.
"To the Unfinished."
Clear eminence without whom I would be nothing.
O great provision never seen,
barely acknowledged even wished away without thinking.
You in whose immeasurable presence the darkness itself comes
to be itself.
And light recalls its colors
and each sound comes echoing your undertone.
I have forgotten when I first woke into knowing you were there.
Before words ever reached me but that time
under your wing is still with me.
You have carried it all the way along with faces
that surface appearing almost as they were before and with the spring
that returns to its leaves never the same.
You have brought me once more to the old house after all these years
of remembering without knowing.
It was you who kept opening the way, offering me what I had to choose.
It is you who come bringing me the only day in the morning.
My wife's name is Paula and this one is "To Paula"
and that's the one that's in your program.
You don't have to turn to it and read it because you might find
that I'm making mistakes.
[laughter] We keep asking where they have gone,
those years we were limber and we reach
for them like hands in the night.
Knowing they must be as close as that
of those 20 years that were just here.
We did not set them down, no.
Not that first night talking at Il Monelo [spelled phonetically].
What did we say?
And then the joy of that summer
that became the joy of the years after it.
Yes, that is where they are.
They turned into each other, love and all have turned
into us now the way a journey turns into the traveler,
even as its sequence is forgotten.
They turned into this later joy:
one day on another island near the end of another year.
Wondering what became of them.
Well, two more poems from that book.
And one is called "To Myself" and you know when you write that,
you're must be getting near the end, but.
[laughter] Even when I forget you I go on looking
for you I believe I would know you I keep remembering you sometimes long
ago but then other times I am sure you were here a moment before
and the air is still alive around where you were
and I think then I can recognize you who are always the same who pretend
to be time but you are not time and who speak in the words
but you are not what they say you
who are not lost when I do not find you.
The last poem in the book is called "To the Book"
and I always been fascinated, or long been fascinated by, envoys.
Envoy means -- I can remember being fascinated by that word
in hymn books when I was a child, my father was a minister
and I didn't know what it meant and then it was in poem books and then,
of course, there's so many envoys there was a very bad poem
of Longfellow's called "Envoy," I think.
And it's echoed, you know, the "Go Lovely Rose," that lovely --
one of the most beautiful poems in English by Waller is the --
it's echoing the envoy poems where you say "go to the book."
And he says, "Go, lovely Rose.
Tell her that wastes her time and me.
That now she knows.
When I resemble her to thee.
How sweet and fair she seems to be."
But that's from the echo runs back through the Middle Ages to books
that are sent out into the world to be ignored, probably,
or to be used for lining pie plates and things like that, but.
Pound wrote a poem, thinking of the Waller poem, beginning,
"Go dumb born book, tell her that signed that song of laws
that had's thou cause" and so on.
It's a beautiful, rather ornate,
rather old fashioned poem, deliberately so.
But it's the kind of thing that we listened to when I was in college.
And there is a kind of music in Pound that wasn't
around in the generations before him, in spite of all his silliness.
"To the Book."
Go on then, in your own time.
This is as far as I will take you.
I am leaving your words with you
as though they had been yours all the time.
Of course you are not finished.
How can you be finished when the morning begins again
or the moon rises?
Even the words are not finished, though they may claim to be.
Never mind, I will not be listening
when they say how you should be different in some way.
You will be able to tell them that the fault was all mine.
Whoever I was when I made you up.
[applause] Now what I would like to do is read a few earlier poems,
partly because they extend what I've been saying.
I mean, every form is a limitation and a sacrifice that allows you
to do things that could not be done otherwise.
But the, I would like to go ahead and read some earlier poems
from an earlier period from the [unintelligible].
Just a very small number and then a very small number
of much more recent poems to end with.
This is one of the few poems that I've written,
I usually don't remember where poems begin at all.
But I never remember poetry readings either.
I remember everything about them, I remember the room
and the people I met, and everything else,
but I don't remember the reading at all.
Just as well.
This one I remember the origin and in the early '60s, three men,
one of them a Quaker, tried to sail a trimaran into the Pacific
to the nuclear...the proposed nuclear test site
to stop the nuclear exploding
with other nuclear test...above-ground nuclear tests
in the Pacific.
They were arrested on the high seas.
They were arrested more than 15 miles out.
They were brought back and charged with, you know, a number of things.
And they brought a counter-suit against the government for piracy
because they'd been boarded more
than 15 miles outside the Continental Divide.
Of course that suit was thrown out.
In the course of the trial, which went on for, I believe 10 days,
outside the San Francisco post office.
One of the first real ant-nuclear
and then what became anti-war demonstrations.
It was in the middle of the Huack [spelled phonetically] disturbances
and the great Civil Rights moment.
It was all coming about at the beginning of the '60s
and there were, there were a whole 30 of us in that demonstration.
And we slept in sleeping bags, deliberately trespassing
on federal property, expecting to be arrested
and many of us were in the end.
I remember getting up our bathroom was across the street
in the Greyhound bus terminal and I remember getting
up early one morning in the cold of San Francisco
and looking along the row of sleeping bags
and that's where this poem began.
What does poetry have to do with history?
"My Friends."
My friends.
My friends without shields walk on the target.
It is late.
The windows are breaking.
My friends without shoes leave what they love.
Grief moves among them as a fire among its bills.
My friends without clocks turn on the dial.
They turn, they part.
My friends with names like gloves set out bare handed
as they have lived and nobody knows them.
It is they that lay the wreaths at the milestones, it is their cups
that are found at the wells and they're then chained up.
My friends without feet sit by the wall nodding to the lame orchestra.
Brotherhood it says on the decorations.
My friend without eyes sits in the rain smiling,
with a nest of salt in his hand.
My friends without fathers or houses hear doors opening
in the darkness who's walls announce,
behold the smoke has come home.
My friends and I have in common, the present.
A wax bell in a wax belfry.
This message telling of medals, this hunger for the sake of hunger,
this owl in the heart and these hands -
one for asking, one for applause.
My friends with nothing leave it behind in a box.
My friends without keys go out from the jails.
It is night.
They take the same road, they miss each other,
they invent the same banner in the dark.
They ask their way only of sentries too proud to breathe.
At dawn the stars on their flag will vanish.
The water will turn up their footprints of the day will rise
like a monument to my friends, the forgotten.
"When the War is Over."
When the war is over, we will be proud of course.
The air will be good for breathing at last.
The water will have been improved.
The salmon and the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly.
The dead will think the living are worth it.
We will know who we are.
And we will all enlist again.
I'm reading deliberately quite different kinds of poems.
It's a very short poem.
I've always loved short poems.
The readers like short poems, too.
[laughter] "Dusk in Winter."
The sun sets in the cold without friends, without reproaches.
After all it has done for us, it goes down believing in nothing.
When it has gone, I hear the stream running after it.
It has brought its flute.
It has a long way.
"For the Anniversary of My Death."
Every year without knowing it, I've passed the day
when the last fires will wave to me
and the silence will set out, tireless traveler.
Like the beam of a lifeless star.
And I will no longer find myself in life as an estranged garment.
Surprised at the Earth and the love of one woman
and the shamelessness of men.
As today writing after three days of rain.
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
and bowing, not knowing to what.
That line about the shamelessness of men was an indirect theft
from the journalism of Jonathan Swift.
"Oh Swift, thou shouldst be living at this hour."
[laughter] Swift said, I am a quite older man, he said,
"I'm no longer surprised that men do evil,
but I'm still sometimes surprised that they're not ashamed."
I don't know what he meant.
And this is another poem about, addressed to that.
I'm ashamed of the way we hate each other.
Yeah, we do.
We want to.
Avoiding news by the river.
As the stars hide in the light before daybreak,
reed warblers hunt along the narrow stream, trout rise to their shadows,
milky light flows through the branches, fills with blood.
Men will be waking.
In an hour, it will be summer.
I dreamed that the heavens were eating the Earth,
waking it is not so.
Not the heavens.
I am not ashamed of the wren's murders, nor the badger's dinners
on which all worldly good depends.
If I were not human I would not be ashamed of anything.
I'd like then just to finish with a small number
of quite different and quite recent poems.
There's a new manuscript to come out next year and this is the first poem
in the new manuscript, called "The Nomad Flute."
You who that sang to me once, sing to me now.
Let me hear your long, lifted note, survive with me.
The stars fading.
I can think farther than that, but I forget.
Do you hear me?
Do you still hear me?
Does your air remember you, o breath of morning night song morning song?
I have with me all that I do not know.
I have lost none of it.
But I know better now than to ask you where you learned that music.
Where any of it came from.
Once there were lions in China.
I will listen until the flute stops and the light is old again.
Phil talked about missing seeing, Zsa Zsa Gabor, was it?
Was it Zsa Zsa Gabor or Eva Gabor?
Hmm. Eva. Eva.
Well I know one of them had Chow, had Chow dogs and she's photographed
with Chows, you know, and we're crazy about Chows
and the...of course Chows, according to the legend,
were bred to hunt lions, which is why they look like lions
and probably part of their bad reputation to them.
They're actually very sweet dogs, but if they're brought
up wrong, they have trouble.
And so, Zsa Zsa Gabor had a very beautiful Chow, I remember it.
Because I remember seeing -- I had forgotten the picture,
she had beautiful legs too.
But she had a beautiful Chow.
[laughter] I never talked to her and that's probably lucky.
[laughter] "Blueberries After Dark."
So this is the way the night tastes one at a time.
Not early, nor late.
My mother told me that I was not afraid of the dark
and when I looked it was true.
How did she know so long ago?
With her father dead almost before she could remember
and her mother following him not long after.
And then her grandmother who had brought her up.
And a little later, her only brother and then her first born,
gone as soon as he was born.
She knew. "Without Knowing."
I've been talking today for various reasons
about knowing and not knowing.
It's a subject that interests me very much.
I think, you know, we think that our knowledge is very important
in the universe, but the universe is a pretty big place.
A very old place.
If we could fly, would there be numbers?
Apart from the seasons?
In sleep I was flying south, so it was autumn.
Numberless autumn with its leaves already far below me.
Some were falling into the river of day; the invisible surface
that remembers and whispers but does not tell, even in sleep.
Not this time.
"My Dark."
There's a section of small elegies in the middle of the book
and these are from that section.
They're all elegiac poems.
Where this time I follow the black dog
into the darkness that is the mind of day.
I can see nothing there but the black dog.
The dog I know going ahead of me, not looking back.
Oh it is the black dog I trust now in my turn after the years
when I had all the trust of the black dog.
Through an age of brightness and through shadow.
On into the blindness of the black dog, where the rooms
of the dark were already known and had no fear
in them for the black dog.
Leading me carefully up the blind stairs.
There's a lullaby in one of them,
"Goodnight:" Sleep softly my old love.
My beauty in the dark.
Night is a dream we have, as you know, as you know.
Night is a dream, you know.
And old love in the dark around you as you go.
Without end as you know.
In the night where you go, sleep softly my old love.
Without end in the dark.
In the love that you know.
"At the Bend."
I look for you, my curl of sleep.
My breathing wave on the night shore,
my star in the fog of morning.
I think you could always find me.
I call to you under my breath.
I whisper to you through the hours.
All your names, my ear of shadow.
I think you can always hear me.
I wait for you, my promise today.
My time again, my homecoming.
My being where you wait for me.
I think always of you waiting.
When I was writing those poems, I began to think of a poem
that I'd known ever since I was a student.
A very small poem.
A very mysterious poem.
A six line poem, attributed --
and apparently nobody's ever challenged it,
to the Emperor Hadrian.
The only reason I don't, I certainly don't challenge it I'm too ignorant
to do that, but, Hadrian wrote in Latin, and I cannot believe
that someone who wrote this poem,
this was the only poem he ever wrote, was the only poem
that we have of Hadrian's.
All my life I've known the poem, I've loved it,
I've known it imperfectly by heart.
I mean, my Latin is not perfect and I knew the poem.
And I've read every translation that I could find.
And I always thought, hmm, there's something,
something gets away, something's not there.
And when I was writing those other poems, which was over a period
of some months, this poem kept coming back in my mind and all
of a sudden I heard the way I would like to hear the poem if it was
in English, as I never have before.
So how long did it take to do that translation?
You know, 50 years at least, you know.
I never intended to translate it either [laughs].
But it's very, this is very literal.
The title, "Little Soul" is really the first word from Latin,
l'animula [spelled phonetically].
Little soul, little stray, little drifter.
Now where will you stay?
All pale and all alone after the way you used to make fun of things.
Cargo, somebody gave me as a present -- after I wrote this poem,
somebody gave me as a present an essay that I'd known for years
and I was suddenly happy to be reminded of it.
Tanizaki, the great Japanese novelist wrote a small essay called
"In Praise of Shadows" on how he loved darkness in rooms
and I thought I felt the same way.
I love not turning on lights and walking around in the dark
and practically have to grope your way and you see
that almost no light there in the house,
but it's enough to see your way.
And, of course, I can remember moments
and Wendell Berry's talked about these too.
Moments of great urgency or of something else that guide you along
when you walk sometimes quite fast across wild country at night
and with no light at all.
But you never hit anything and you never trip,
nothing bad ever happens.
If the spell ever breaks, then you are in trouble, but [laughs].
"Cargo." The moment of the evening when the pictures set sail
from the walls with their lights out.
Unmooring without hesitation nor stars.
They carry no questions as their unseen sails, the beginning
and the end, wing and wind bear them
out beyond the faces, each set in its instant.
And beyond the landscapes of other times and the tables piled
with fruit just picked, and with motionless animals all together
known in the light as still lives.
They sail on the sound of night, bearing with them
that life they have been trying to show from dawn until dark.
"A Letter to Tsu Tung Bull [spelled phonetically]."
Iit's by a great, great, late Dong [spelled phonetically] poet.
Almost a thousand years later I am asking the same questions you did.
The ones you kept finding yourself returning
to as though nothing had changed except the tone of them.
Another echo growing deeper and what you knew of the coming
of age before you had grown old.
I do not know anymore than you did then about what you were asking
as I sit at night above the hushed valley thinking
of you on your river.
That one bright sheet of moonlight in the dream of the water birds.
And I hear the silence after your questions.
How old are the questions tonight?
"Basho's Child."
Beside the Fuji River, there is a lost child crying dead
for 300 years.
And who knows how many more since the evening in autumn
when her mother carried her out to the water.
Noise that would cover the sound of her crying.
And then walked back into the silence
and the child cried all night and into the frosty daylight.
When the men who discovered her stood over her like shadows,
their hands talking but only to each other.
Until one of them at last bent to put something
on the leaves beside her before they all went away with the sound
of her crying following him
and following the words he would write about her.
Wherever the words might go.
"September's Child:" September light gray
and rose touches the ridge above the valley.
Seeps upward at daybreak through its own silence
without beginning, without stages.
With white clouds still cloaking the river and a great ship
of towers anchored on the one hill that rises through them.
That amber morning in the market's unfolding,
smiles of veteran vendors assembled once more in bright day.
Old hands holding honey jars.
Sunlight on weathered faces.
Knowing summer and winter well but bowing to neither of them.
In the cool fragrance wild strawberries,
raspberries, spice bread.
The morning when the first green figs are ripening
and single birds come bringing their late hopes as the light warms,
recognizing through the remaining leaves a moment they have never seen
as I do, waking again here after many lifetimes.
To the sight of a morning before I was born.
"A Momentary Creed."
Suppose this has something to do with the question, Phil,
that we keep going back to.
The connection between intuition, the imagination and history.
How we ought to behave.
I believe in the ordinary day that is here at this moment before me.
I do not see it going its own way, but I never saw how it came to me.
It extends beyond whatever I think I may know and all that is real to me.
It is the present that it bears away, where has it gone
when it has gone from me?
There is no place I know outside today except
for the unknown all around me.
The only presence that appears to stay.
Everything that I call mine it led me.
Even the way that I believe the day,
for as long as it is there, before me.
"Rain Light."
All day the stars watch from long ago.
My mother said, "I am going now."
When you are alone you will be alright.
Whether or not you know, you will know.
Look at the old house in the dawn rain.
All the flowers are ponds of water.
The sun realigns them through a white cloud,
touches the patchwork spread on the hill, the washed colors
of the afterlife that lived there long before you were born.
See how they wait without a question?
Even though the whole world is burning.
One more poem, called "The Laughing Thrush."
O nameless joy of the morning, tumbling upward note-by-note
out of the night to the hush of the dark valley and out
of what never has not been there.
Song unquestioning and unbounded, yes, this is the place
of the one time in the whole of before and after with all
of memory waking into it and the lost visages that hover
around the edge of sleep, constant and clear.
And the words that lately have fallen silent
to surface among the phrases of some future if there is a future.
Here is where they all sing the first daylight.
Whether or not there is anyone listening.
Thank you.
[applause] [low audio] Dr. Bobbitt: Your applause speaks for itself
as does the extraordinary silence
that you imposed on a very noisy city.
For a very memorable evening.
Thank you immensely.
I just thought as you mentioned about history and the connection
with poetry, we have a granddaughter of President Eisenhower
and the daughter of President Johnson with us tonight.
It's wonderful to have such a great audience, but two of you
in particular remind us of history.
And you have given us something
that goes beyond history, the beauty of poetry.
Thank you.
Just to show that there is some substance to the Bobbitt Award,
I just want to present you this along with our thanks.
[applause] [end of transcript] LOC - 071031ars2000 2 5/17/2010