Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Patricia Grey: Hi, I'm Patricia Grey.
I run the Poetry and Literature Center here.
Need I say more?   Turn these things off.
The reading today is being recorded.
And if I can just get mine turned off, we'll get started.
Today is a new day for our poetry program at the library.
The Poetry at Noon program is 14 years old,
and this is the first time we've had a poetry reading
in this very room, the Whittall Pavilion.
And Gertrude Clarke Whittall was one of the donors to the poetry program
so we're really pleased to be in this room today.
We think it's really important to have a reading, a live reading
in the Jefferson Building because this building is also the building
that houses the office of the Poet Laureate of the United States.
So when people come to the Jefferson Building, we'd like them
to have a little taste of poetry.
So Kentucky poets, you're the representatives of that today.
The poet laureate, as you probably know,
is not here all the time anymore.
She lives in California, but she does come here several times a year.
She sends her best regards, and also the Senators from Kentucky,
Senator Jim Bunning and Senator Mitch McConnell,
send their best wishes to the Kentucky poets
and the other poets no longer living in Kentucky,
but who are Kentucky natives.
And also the Congressman Ben Chandler is not able to be here,
but he was here just a few minutes ago, right?
So I want to mention that the Poetry
and Literature Center is not the only sponsor today;
that's a new thing too.
The Center for the Book at the Library of Congress,
John Cole is the head of it,
and he's come to hear the Kentucky Poets.
His center is co-sponsoring along with the Kentucky Arts Council,
who gave us a partnership grant for this event which allows us
to pay modest honorarium for the first time to Poetry at Noon readers
and also to invite you to stay for lunch afterwards.
If you're interested in the poets' books,
please talk with them after the reading.
Let's see where am I?   Okay, now for the good part.
I'm going to introduce Poet Laureate of Kentucky, Jane Gentry Vance,
and she will read a poem just to give you a sample,
and then she will introduce the three, equally talented Yale Series
of Younger Poets winners.
It's astonishing that Kentucky has this much talent.
If you don't know, the Yale Series
of Younger Poets is a national award given to poets under 40 who have not
yet published a book when they received the award.
Now, they've all published books.
[laughter] Jane Gentry Vance is a professor of English
at the University of Kentucky.
Her most recent books are Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig,
which was published in 2006 and that in itself is worth an award.
[laughter] And also A Year in Kentucky:
A Garland of Poems published in 2005 and other books,
but these are her most recent.   And I wanted to tell you one thing
that makes her really unique among poets.
In 2007 she appeared on the "Good Morning America" show.
She had been invited to write a poem
about fellow Kentuckian Diane Sawyer, who's co-anchor
of that show, and read that poem.
And so she wrote a poem, and you're going to have to tell me the title.
It's "Diana of the Crossroads."
And so you see that Kentucky is a wellspring of poetic talent
and maybe we will find out what's so special about Kentucky water --
[laughter] -- or whatever today.
You know most poets don't get invited to be
on "Good Morning America," so I think that's a singular honor.
And I want to just say this,
if you think that state Poets Laureate are people
who write nice greeting card verse about their states, which is nice,
I just want you to know that Jane Gentry Vance is much much more
than that.
She is gifted, honest, and fearless, a lyrical poet whom I really admire.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce Jane Gentry Vance.
[ Applause ]
Jane Gentry Vance: Thank you, Patricia,
and thank all of you for being here today.
It's a pleasure and an honor to welcome you to the Library
of Congress Poetry at Noon Series for November,
featuring these three Kentucky poets who are stellar
in the bright firmament, as Patricia said, of Kentucky writers.
Tony Crunk from Daviess County where Owensboro is the County Seat,
Maurice Manning from Danville in Boyle County, and Davis McCombs
from Munfordville or from near Munfordville in Hart County.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Patricia,
Director of the Poetry and Literature Center here
at the Library of Congress for inviting us to do this.
And I also want to thank the Director
of the Kentucky Arts Council and the Arts Council for contributing
to the sponsorship of this event.
And I also want to thank my former student,
Jean Berry [spelled phonetically], who is the assistant to the director
of the Division of Collections and Services here at the Library
who introduced me, to Patricia and was the first link in the chain
Kentucky's literary tradition is long and rich.
It includes Abraham Lincoln, the most influential wisest prose writer
in the history of our country, I believe.
It includes Robert Penn Warren, the first Poet Laureate,
the first National Poet Laureate,
and presently it includes Wendell Berry whose practical
and prophetic voice is a beacon in the confusion
of the days that we live in.
Paradoxically Kentucky which sits near the bottom in most measures
of literacy and education has
since the early 19th century disproportionately produced
great writers.
While there are complex reasons for this,
I want to mention one simple one.
A sense of the particularity of the state is one reason, I believe,
that fine writers abound.
Kentuckians and Kentucky writers have been slow
to cede their attachment to a home landscape,
to a particular patch of ground.
The contours of this home place gives shape to their being
in the world, have given a sense of connection to families,
to communities, communities held together by small local schools,
by churches, by common labor.
In Kentucky, people have been slower than in other regions of the country
to forget their common history and the need for connection to
and dependence on each other in their own local place.
Kentucky was the first frontier beyond the Alleghenies.
In the eyes of the early explorers and the brave rag tag settlers
who followed them, Kentucky held out the promise of a new Eden,
a garden beyond the mountains which would yield
to those determined usurpers the plenty of game and fertile ground
that long had been held sacred by the Native Americans
who hunted and lived there.
Because Kentucky was the first Western frontier,
it became a foundation state that funneled many pioneers further west
so that the sense of Kentucky as a blessed place, a promised land,
spread from Kentucky into the expanding country to the north,
to the south, and beyond the Mississippi.
For example, both John McCain
and Barack Obama have direct ancestral ties to Kentucky:
McCain to Laurel County and Obama to Nelson County.
Sustaining this sense of place, family, and community,
I think are the cultures of small farming,
particularly tobacco farming and coal mining,
both of which activities tend to connect their practitioners
to the patch of earth on which it takes place.
And tobacco farming was an activity that from
which many people could earn a living, a good living,
on a very few acres of ground so more people retained
for a longer time their connection to a place.
So today, I'm so happy to present
to you three Kentucky poets whose work continues these traditions
while sounding with each of their own 21st century voices.
Within a scant six years, as Patricia said,
these three won the Yale Younger Poets Competition;
Tony Crunk in 1994 for Living in the Resurrection, Davis McCombs in '99
for Ultima Thule, and Maurice Manning in 2000
for his Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions.
The sense of Kentucky as a place and a culture informs their poetry,
shapes each of their -- each of these writers and shapes their work.
Before I introduce Tony, I want to read to you a single poem of my own
about an actual garden in my hometown of Versailles.
[laughter] I consider myself very cosmopolitan.
I was born in Athens and -- [laughter] -- I live in Versailles.
But this is about a real house in Versailles and the vision
of it here is of a latter day Eden with its own aged Adam and Eve,
Under the fluorescent sun it is always Southern California inside
the Kroger.
Hard avocadoes rot as they ripen from the center out.
Tomatoes granulate inside their hides.
But by the parking lot, a six tree orchard frames a cottage
where winter has set in.   Pork fat seasons these rooms.
The wood range spits and hisses, limbers the oilcloth on the table
where an old man and an old woman draw the quarter moons
of their nails, shadowed still with dirt,
across the legends of seed catalogues.
Each morning he milks the only goat inside the limits of Versailles.
She feeds [laughter] a rooster that wakes up all the neighbors.
[laughter] Through dark afternoons
and into night they study the roses' velvet mouths
and the apples' bright skins that crack at the first bite.
When thaw comes, the man turns up the sod and,
on its underside, ciphers roots and worms.
The sun like an angel beats its wings above their grubbing.
Evenings on the viney porch they rock,
discussing clouds, the chance of rain.
Husks in the dark dirt fatten and burst.
Now, it is my pleasure to introduce Tony Crunk from Western Kentucky
who lives now in Birmingham.
He holds degrees from Center College in Danville, which seems to be kind
of an epicenter for -- [laughter] -- Kentucky poetry, from the University
of Kentucky where he earned an MA in philosophy and the University
of Virginia where he earned an MFA.
He has taught at the University of Montana
James Dickey, who chose his Living in the Resurrection
for the Yale prize, writes in the introduction to Living
in the Resurrection, "Always beginning
from his rural Kentucky homeland through all of his wanderings,
the poet's orientation is land and home and family based.
And his primary art is also that of his homeland's religion
of southern gospel music and homiletics."
It's my pleasure to present Tony Crunk.
[ Applause ]
Tony Crunk: Thank you, Jane, appreciate it and thank you
to our hosts for having us and for you all for being here.
It's an honor to be here, of course, and it's especially an honor
to share a podium with my friends and fellow Kentuckians Jane
and Davis and Maurice who are not only writers of the first order,
but they're just really first-rate human beings.
You may not know this but, unfortunately,
the poetry business seems to attract more than its share
of unsavory characters -- [laughter] -- charlatans, self-promoters --
[laughter] -- horses' asses -- [laughter] --
of various stripes and persuasions,
but these three folks bring an integrity to their work
and to their writing and to their teaching and to their lives
that are really rare in any field,
and I'm proud to know them as friends.
Last night as we were visiting, the conversation turned for a while
to a topic that's a perennial one for us as it is for a lot of people,
but maybe especially people from places like Kentucky,
and that's this ongoing tension we feel in our lives
between on the one hand a deep abiding love and appreciation
for the place of our origin and on the other hand,
our having various spiritual or personal or economic reasons
for not being able to stay in that place after a certain point.
So I wanted to start with a couple of poems that address that topic.
They're kind of companion poems.   One is a poem about leaving home,
and the other one is a poem about returning home.
And I want to read these for my two pals,
Davis and Morris, so listen up kids.   You might learn something.
[laughter] Missing Persons, Forgotten Land Accidents
of Illumination Bitter Crossings.
I am leaving I am leaving under the wing of night.
And why should I return if only to remember I am nothing if only
to be washed and made whole again & again.
The second poem is entitled "Redemption," and there's mention
in it of my grandfather who was a Baptist preacher,
and he was a very good one.
[laughter] I kept the bejesus [spelled phonetically] scared
out of me most Sundays.   As the saying goes, "Whenever
that man preached a sermon, it stayed preached."
[laughter] This poem is entitled "Redemption,"and it's in four parts.
[ Poem formats may differ from the author's original format ]
1. Driving through the mining counties Green River
to Central City light of dawn like water shadows rising
to the surface Going back for my grandmother's funeral:
in Muhlenberg a raised welt
of railroad tracks bitter porches emptying to morning
and beneath the skewed abandoned cross of a telephone pole a woman
with a tin scuttle gathering coal that had fallen
from the trains dried clots of earth's blood.
2. Afternoon at my father's house sun filling empty flower pots
by the coal shed watching the hollyhocks the roses
and mimosa recalling one
of my grandfather's sermons how the souls will one day set
out to find their new bodies how they will leave behind this hollow
earth swirling with ice and rags I imagine them rising
above the blistering corn above the dust
of the dry rose the chaff settling and all they can see
from the air is the smallest thing: a piece of straw caught
in the planks of the barn door a black wasp clinging
3. Awake that night in the spare room which once was mine,
streetlamp through the curtains a lit sparkler of moths radio
from an upstairs window fear of nakedness
of insignificance the corridors
of my narrow life The viewing room was carpeted
and modern counting sadly backward to myself.
4. Moon in the spines of the hawthorn clouds amethyst
and omniscient hands of the clock again moving toward morning
and I picture headlights tracing through the cemetery
as through a maze When our souls lie waiting
in their beds our bodies awaiting the end of baptism by earth
and we picture somewhere above us the house we were born in,
can see the hydrangeas and inpatients by the steps a crown
of gnats hovering above the four o'clocks.
A red bee bowing into one of the yellow blossoms
and through an open window, a lamp, curtains reaching up into the room,
what peace will lift us, whispering what hope who want only to rise
to the surface as through water?
What peace when we want to return not set out when we want only
to step up on to that windy porch to step back through that fiery door?
Now, those poems are from my first book.
Since then I've kind of moved from the autobiographical and taken
on the more immodest task of trying to re-mythologize the world.
[laughter] And you know I'm doing a pretty good job of it, frankly.
[laughter] Anyway so here's four poems
that are of more recent origin.
The first one is entitled "Crows"and it's --
I don't know, it's in several parts.
The first part is entitled "Encomium."
Great bird of iron born of crucible and anvil first creation
of the forges of tubal cane your feathers are strokes
of black lightning, your head a fierce coal struck
from the nether side of the sun,
your claws have clutched the life from night's throat.
Your names multiply like seeds of darkness: Magus, Chaldean,
Grave bird, Hell wing, Ohm's thief.
Ravenous you devour the earth grain by grain.
Your piked [spelled phonetically] tongue has sipped the waters
of chaos when you alone strode the roof beam of the ark gloating
over a world gone down to anguish and for this your voice is rust now,
is sand and stone and thorn, your great wisdom nothing now,
but the outraged croaking's of a feeble, second-hand pharaoh.
One crow sorrow, two crows mirth, three crows death, four crows birth,
five crows poor, six crows rich, seven crows curse, eight crows wish.
3. Riddle
What I had mistaken for eternity was only the long silence before the
next tick of the second hand The elm outside my window filling
with crows a clattering of death, undertakers,
surrounded on all sides by the universe.
Stars clanking by on their pulleys, planets heaving and whistling,
and the crow's incessant, imperious calling, Watchmen,
watchmen what is left of the night 4.
Shuffle and sigh, shuffle and sigh, all God's children born to die.
Rattle and moan, rattle and moan, all God's children dead and gone.
5. Muse
Late February and the crow has come through yet another winter,
one good eye, burnt wing, heart still whispering.
But as snow again breaks free, falls to earth,
she lifts from the birch branch, cries twice, vengefully "Aye, Aye,"
and wings off across the stubble field vanishing finally
Here's a poem.
[laughter] It says here its entitled "Sailor's Dreams,"
and it has an epigraph
by the contemporary Chinese poet Bidal [spelled phonetically]
and the epigraph is, "The lighthouse that died long ago shines
in the seaman's gaze," and this poem is in three parts.
1. A street corner and leaning against a brick face an angel
on crutches, sling blades for wings.
Two drunks in the alley, a blind crow named grief,
his lame dog hunger, singing "Oh, the sea is burning, burning,
but the fish have all flown to the sun."
2. A deserted beach town shuttered up for winter,
a few saints with their seeing eye dogs strolling the boardwalk,
a young widow leaning in the doorway of the mariner's chapel,
a red crow on the roof beam calling, "Hold tight Father, hold tight.
We're going under faster than before."
3. A blind man's cane, long bone out walking
by itself passing along a ghost-white fence
on which the moon's suicide note is scrawled out in crow shadow,
"This living is deep waters; this death is steady rolling."
Did you notice there were some crows in that poem too?
[laughter] They seem to be kind of following me around.
This last poem I'll read for you is an "Ars Poetica," and I know
that because it's titled "Ars Poetica."
[laughter] Thank you again for having us
and for your generosity and your hospitality.
This poem is in three parts and it begins with an epigraph
by the French poet Augustin Pulp [spelled phonetically] who says,
"Poetry is the slowest form of non-existence."
[laughter]   Yeah, you laugh, huh?
On a serious note I wrote this poem for a dear friend of mine
that I lost a few years ago to an accidental drowning death,
so this is for him and thank you again.
1. Time steps out of the hallway clock quietly so as not
to wake the mirrors, drifts
through the upstairs rooms closed off for winter.
Filling slowly now with memory,
this house whose children were once its promises,
whose roof was once its wings, night now draped at the windows,
moonlight ghosting the trees.   Now even the fire is weary.
Smoke across the hillside an angel yearning to be heavier than air.
2. There the road is a grey water of time where I would set
out to climb the holy mountain of bells.
Night birds taken to their nests, world spent and quieted,
net of fireflies unwinging like sleep about me.
Surface of the dark giving way revealing lost kingdoms
where the snowstorm rests in its cave and the spider sings
out her web and I, like a word released from the tongue find a path
through the air, "Become smoke, become nothing,"
and thus like a shadow at evening, I am gone.
3. Here leaning over this page into the circle of lamplight,
I thought I saw you little stranger,
little ghost orphan stillborn other of my life.
I thought I saw what grave distance you had come, carrier of light
through all salt and its bitterness climbing the steep stair
up through water drawn by the sound of oars.
But no, again it was only the dry moat fine grain of time setting off
across the unexplored ocean of my eye.
Thanks.   [ Applause ]
Jane Gentry Vance: Thank you, Tony.
Davis McCombs from Munfordville in Heart County in the middle
of Kentucky cave country is very close to Mammoth Cave where about
which he wrote his first his book, Ultima Thule.
He now directs the MFA program at the University of Arkansas
where he holds the Roper Professorship in creative writing.
His undergraduate work was at Harvard.
His MFA, like Tony's is from the University of Virginia.
In 1996/98 he was at Stanford University
as a Wallace Stegner Fellow.
His second book, Dismal Rock, was published last year,
and it won the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press in Vermont.
For more than a decade Davis worked as a park ranger
at Mammoth Cave National Park.   Davis McCombs.
[ Applause ]
Davis McCombs: Thank you so much, Jane, thank you all.
It's an incredible honor to be here.
As Jane was saying, I grew up in a little part of Kentucky known
as the cave land or the cave country and this is three counties
in the south central part of the state,
and this little area has more caves than any other place on earth,
including the longest cave in the world, Mammoth Cave, where,
as Jane said, I worked as a park ranger for 10 years.
And it is true that many of the poems
in my first book Ultima Thule are about the cave,
about that particular area, about the people who live above the cave.
And one of the things that interested me in writing those poems
and thinking about this place where I'd grown up,
was in this little area you have an agricultural community.
You have a community that is dependent
on the land for its livelihood.
On the other hand, you have this landscape
that is anything but dependable.
Because of the caves below the landscape is really unstable,
and it can just really fall out from under your feet and where I lived,
you know the ponds in that area, they were all built
in these stopped up sink holes.
So if there was any disturbance in the ground at all,
the ponds just disappeared, they drained into the caves below.
And there was -- when I was a kid in 1976 we had a little earthquake
in the county where I lived.   And in that night we lost 13 ponds.
[laughter] And this poem is about that
and the only other thing I'll tell you here is that the Jesus bugs
at the end of the poem are, you know, the insects that walk
on water, just a local name that we had for them.
[laughter] This is called "Ponds."   The night we lost thirteen of them,
tremors shook along New Madrid Fault.
In field after field the moon rose to its own face echoed back,
cattle circling a crater's rim.
Along these margins, life had fixed --
an algal bloom, its underwater thud.
They were sucked through vast caverns.
In the Caveland every pond's a fluke.
Let them be brief, then, as the land Gives up the ghost of fog,
morning in the sway backed enclaves.
Already the clay dries and separates along small faults.
We expect no return.   Not even a tadpole's kink in mud
where Jesus bugs made miracles the only way they could --
as if there were no underworld, as if the pond would last.
Again, as Jane said, I did work at Mammoth Cave for many years.
It started as a summer job for me and then once I finished
up with all those years of higher education I wasn't,
you know qualified to do pretty much anything -- [laughter] --
so I went straight back to my park ranger job.
[laughter] And about the time that I started working
at Mammoth Cave we changed the gate to the cave.
When I started working there,
if you went down to the big historic entrance to the cave,
the gate was a rock wall and a metal door.
And it finally occurred to the people there
that this was keeping the bats out of the cave.
We knew that we didn't have the bat population that we thought we should
and that we knew we'd had in the past so it took
like 50 years to figure this out.
[laughter] And so the old gate was torn down, it was replaced
with what we call "bat gate" and it's just baffled.
It keeps people out, but it allows the bats to go back and forth.
And it also had the effect of unleashing the breath of the cave.
Anybody that's been to the historic entrance of Mammoth Cave
on a hot summer day knows that you are met there
by this tremendous blast of 54 degree air issuing from the cave.
So this poem is called "Dismantling the Cave Gate."
It started with the clang of plates and girders, one last click
of the rusted turnstile, and then a river
of breath had come loose into the night.
The workmen claimed it took the hats from their heads,
blew out their lights, and for a moment they had stood in darkness,
listening to the cave's unearthly moan.
It was a sound not heard in over fifty years that rippled
out into the undergrowth, whistled across the limestone lintel,
and rose -- a rustling vast and unfamiliar
to the bats beneath the street lamps and underpasses, who gathered it
in their ears and followed, dark and fluttering, to the fluttering dark.
Just a couple of poems from my first book Ultima Thule.
The first section of my second book, Dismal Rock,
is a series of poems called "Tobacco Mosaic."
And the poems are about the disappearing culture
of white burley tobacco farming that I knew growing up.
Tobacco, like any other job, has its own vocabulary,
its own set of words that we use.
And there was something just so nice about writing these poems
and coming back to those words that I had spoken my whole life.
It was like just a sort of linguistic homecoming for me.
And this poem is called "Lexicon."
The people are talking about bud worms;
they are talking about aphids and thrips.
Under the bluff at Dismal Rock, there where the spillway foams
and simmers, they are fishing and talking about pounds and allotments;
they are saying white burly, lugs and cutters.
Old men are whittling sticks with their pocketknives
and they are saying Paris green; they speak of topping
and side-dressing; they are whistling and talking about setters,
plant beds and stripping rooms.
At Hedgepeths under the shade of the Feed Mill awning,
in that place of burlap and seedbins, of metal scoops,
they are sitting on milk crates; they are drinking from bottles
and they are talking about pegs, float plants, and tier poles.
At the Depot Market they say blue mold, high color; they are nodding
and saying sucker dope; they are leaning on the counter and talking
about Black Patch, high boys, flue-cured.
They are arguing about horn worms and buyouts.
They are saying comeback, comeback, comeback.
You know, I wrote the tobacco poems really to think
about my own involvement in tobacco farming
and my family's involvement and, you know, it's a quagmire of moral
and ethical dilemmas, it really is.
And you don't, or at least I don't write poems to find answers exactly.
I write them more to know what the questions are.
And I think it's possible to loathe smoking and abhor the practices
of the big tobacco companies and to at the same time love or have loved
that way of life that was tobacco farming,
which raises a lot of other questions.
When I was a young man and when I would rail against the evils
of tobacco, my mother would say to me, "Tobacco paid for education."
[laughter] She was right and I have, all these years,
I've carried that with me.
And I think there's some sense that, you know every word I write is
[laughter] This poem is called "Nicotiana."
Tobacco, he was told, paid for your education.
And all along the bluff that afternoon grasshoppers sprang
up from his footsteps and shook faint ripples
through the amethyst air of late July.
He stumbled down a slope of fescue, through saw briars
and the mesh of the tree line.
He entered the weed beds at the waters crumpling edge.
He entered the creek, that plane of sliding liquid and he stepped
over rocks that split and swiveled it.
He has not forgotten that day.
He has sat alone at a table and thought of it; rubbing the sticks
in his hands together he has wanted to rekindle its fire.
He thinks of the stones sunk deep in their sockets of mud.
He thinks of stretching his legs, of crossing to the other bank.
He thinks of the words he writes, of the dark like silt beneath them
and of the secret hiding like a crayfish there.
And I'm going to end with one new poem I've been working on,
struggling mightily with this series of poems that tried to tell a story,
tried to be a narrative taken altogether.
And this particular poem is about a character in this story,
his name is Skink, and he has a lot of traumatic things happen to him
in his childhood, the last of which is
that he gets his arm caught in a hay baler.
And after that accident, he never speaks again.
He's completely silent for the rest of his life.
And this poem is about him.
It's also about this thing, this phenomenon in the cave land
where there are places where you can drop something in a sink hole,
then get in your truck or car and go down to the river to a blue hole,
which is a big spring where water is coming out of the cave.
And you can wait there and whatever you dropped in will pop back out.
And I talked to an old man that I knew and he said
that he once dropped a watermelon in a sinkhole -- [laughter] --
and went down to the blue hole and sat there waiting
for it to come up and it did.
[laughter] This poem is called "Freshwater Drum."
A boy is carrying a watermelon in the basket of his un-tucked T-shirt.
He is picking his way down a ditch of weeds at the back of the garden.
The morning ahead un-scrolls like a map.
He is following the ditch toward a sink hole,
a dark so dark it trembles.
This is the period toward which the sentence of runoff flings itself,
a portal where the syntax of rain comes un-hinged.
It has been dry for two months.
The dark gives back nothing, but his own heart pumping.
Now, he is riding his bicycle down a washboard road rattling
over culverts in whose slubs [spelled phonetically] the summer's
last mosquitoes breed.
Sometimes an ingot of water is a world, is enough?
There's gravel dust, the smell of fescue.
In a month the boy will catch his right arm in the rollers
of a hay bailer, but now he is scrambling down a path of mud
and hoof prints to the blue hole, catching a grapevine
for balance in his still whole hand.
In the silent years to come, his withered arm will grow
like that vine up the trunk of his body.
And sometimes he will think of the spring, that cold
and blossoming knob of water.
Sometimes even now as he teeters down the ditch towards sleep,
the low pitched thump of his finger on the rind comes back to him
and he is waiting un-injured where a white perch drums its tendons
by the undercut silt bank.
And there among the sunlight's facets
and the sunken stones something striped and oblong
and familiar wobbles into focus.   Thank you all very much.
[ Applause ]   Jane Gentry Vance: Thank you, Davis.
Maurice Manning from Danville
in Central Kentucky won the Yale prize in 2000.
His volume was chosen by W.S. Merwin as Davis was.
Maurice's second book, A Companion for Al,
was published in 2004 is written in the voice of Daniel Boone as [break
in audio] in the Kentucky wilderness.
Both that book and his third, published last year, Bucolics,
are published by Harcourt.
His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker,
The Virginia Quarterly Review and others.
Maurice teaches at Indiana University in the MFA program
and in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College.
Maurice Manning.   [ Applause ]
Maurice Manning: Thank you, Jane.
One of these days we're going to have to pool our resources
and give Jane some kind
of huge Caribbean cruise, how would you like that?
Jane Gentry Vance: I'd prefer the Greek Islands.
[laughter] Maurice Manning: Okay, we'll get our people on it.
[laughter] Thanks, folks for coming out and being
such good poetry reading attenders.
[laughter] I'm going to read several new poems that are tiny;
they're only 30 words long.
I like to give myself these little assignments, and the assignment
for these poems was six lines, five words each line.
And there's a little bit of a metrical pattern going on,
too, but that's irrelevant.
[laughter] And all of these have the first word of the title as "The."
Had you been also there?
How the hell would I Have known beneath the smoke Bailing the stars
though some Of them escaped the veil.
A pity poked my heart Stuck
like an I don't Know what maybe a thorn No, a beggar's louse.
See The poor thing bless its Heart, poor thing hung on.
Tony writes about crows, so do I, and I also write
about people who can't speak.
[Laughs] We got switched around at birth.
[laughter] All kinds of weird things happened.
"Get over here with us, flathead,"
the near crow said inflected with caws.
"We need three you, Blackie, and Me.
Go pigeon-toed and sulky.   That's it, good, sulkier, good.
[laughter] This is -- in Kentucky we take risks
with the English language sometimes.
[laughter] And so instead of hollow we all say, "holler,"
or instead of follow, "foller."   [laughter] And I love all that.
So this is called, "The Word Foller and Others Like It."
Oh come along behind, heel up close here.
Let's foller the holler's moon-glint stream rushy
as a woman's hair set how?
A loose. God's dream goes this a way, hind ways his finger.
We just got through having persimmon time in Kentucky
and unless you're nimble or a basketball player,
about the only way you can get persimmons is to shake the tree.
And this is called "The Persimmon Tree."
I shook the tree all right, troubling it for two persimmons.
Were they symbolic hanging there, reddish flecks ticking the sky?
And wasn't the man shinnied halfway up another symbol?
I often think -- we were talking
about this last night our issues with organized religion.
I think it's more than just a general issue with organization.
[laughter] But I also think for me --
don't want to speak for these gentlemen,
but writing a poem is a way to ask questions of God, or about God.
This is called "The Prayer for Pigs."
Oh, god, my swine heard god, send me two pigs, please,
to swallow my two demons.
Drive them like nails into the poor pigs' brains.
Better make it three, three pigs.
[laughter] That's like the three little pigs.
I didn't -- I just got that.
[laughter] And I will now file that away for the next time I read it --
[laughter] -- to impress the audience with my wit.
[laughter] This is a longer poem called --
from a book that's coming out next fall.
And these are all couplets of tetrameter
in case you people like stuff like that.
And these are intentionally narrative poems.
I'll just read one of them called "The Mute."
If you go up the holler far Enough,
you'll spy a little house half-hidden in the trees.
It's dark up there all day and when the night comes down,
it's darker yet.
There's two old brothers living in that house
and the younger one is fatter than a tick with lies and sassy tales.
One time a bear came through and ate a couple doz-
en pawpaws these brothers had shaken from the tree and left lined
up on the porch rail to ripen.
And Murdock,[spelled phonetically] their good-for-nothing dog,
who had retired to the porch on account of all the work he'd done
that day, never so much as growled nor raised an eye.
The brothers were tending to the pole beans in the garden patch
and once the bear had slunk away both brothers said at once,
"Why shoot" and "H-E double toothpicks, Murdock."
And then the younger one said, "Jinx."
[laughter] And the older brother spit in the dirt.
According to the younger one, who couldn't hold his belly still
from all the laughter he'd provoked, it was about a year
and a half before he let his brother speak.
But then it didn't last too long on account of Murdock treed a woman.
[laughter] She'd come up there to see how poor these brothers were
and if they needed some religious reading material.
[laughter] She called, "Hello," then Murdock wolfed his wolf as fierce
as he could be and she shinnied up the pawpaw tree,
[laughter] and hollered "Help."
Old Murdock, well he never left the porch.
[laughter] These brothers were digging a privy hole behind the
house and when the woman hollered, they came running around
and six feet off the ground this pretty red-haired woman was
trembling in the pawpaw tree
and the poor thing's skirt had gotten bunched
around her thighs as she was climbing up.
This otherwise respectable woman came near
to blinding the brothers right there.
[laughter] Her bloomers were so bright.
Now it took a moment or two before the brothers could gather their
wits, but once they did they tried to look concerned and turned
to the porch and said in a single voice,
"You son-of-a-biscuit eater, Murdock.
You've done scared this young gal halfway out of her drawers."
The younger brother grinned and jinxed the older one again.
Because I jinxed him, he told me one day
when I asked why I'd never heard the other brother speak.
How long has he been jinxed, I asked.
"Lord years," he said, "And I don't reckon he remembers how to speak.
And it's been so long, I've plumb forgot his name.
[laughter] I can't take back the jinx no more."
Now remember what I said, this man is fatter than a June bug with lies
and he can spread them pretty thick, though I've never minded listening.
Many a time I've stopped up there to visit
and every time it seems the younger brother has just been waiting.
"What's the good word," he always asks.
Yes, many a time I've stopped up there,
[laughter] Lord knows what became of that young woman
or if she continued her ministry.
[laughter] And one day old Murdock went to heaven.
Why even a bad dog gets to go.
I'll read three little poems from my last book called "Bucolics."
And these are not titled or punctuated.
And they're in the voice of this shepherd guy who's talking
to another character named Boss.   And Boss never speaks.
[laughter] what color is your collar Boss is your backbone sore
from bending over when you clap your hand
against your thigh does a little cloud of dust fly off?
do you wipe your face with your shirttail Boss I'd bet my wages
that you do though I couldn't say
for sure how much my wages are they're probably enough O I get
by alright a beech seed here a feather there a locust wing a wing
as light as air besides it lets light through I get a double portion
from you I tie my purse strings tight but put this
in your pocket all I have I'd lay it on the table Boss for you.
I'd bet you jerk your lines you hang your salty harness from a red nail
in your barn you pour your horse a scoop
of oats you give its tail a tug.
You say nighty night you spotted nag it's funny Boss I can hear you
chuckle when you shut the stall you're happy
for a good day's work a spotted horse I wonder
if that horse's spots are real or painted on it makes me smile
to think about it Boss even field hands need a laugh
or two a rusty riddle, a twisty tongue I wouldn't put it past you O
This has a dog in it.
I told that old dog he could hush Boss I said there now you're just
having a shaky little dream dream a dream dream Boss how
about that talking to a dog that way there there it's just a little dream
dream you don't have to whimper that's what I can't stand Boss
to see an old dog whimper what's
in an old dog's dream dream anyway some rabbits Boss or barking
up a tree say do you ever have a dream dream Boss are you running
after or away from me tell me sometime
if your big feet ever twitch.   This is the last one I'll read.
first hawk you hung up in the sky Boss O tell me did you give it any
warning any sign that something fun was going to happen I wonder
if you said listen Red I'm going
to let you ride the wind you won't even have
to flap Boss how many days ago was that I'd say it was a lot a lot
of hawks a lot of days it's always a lot of everything
with you you big britches Boss you do just what you want
to do I guess you think it's cute to hang a little hawk you're full
of surprises Boss you keep me
on my toes how many times will I go tippy toe for you you Boss
of all the good stuff Boss
of all the numbers hang me Boss you make me wish I was a bird.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
Jane Gentry Vance: Thank you all for being here to hear this trio
of wonderful voices and I hope you'll all stay
for refreshments afterwards.   Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Patricia Grey: I have to say just one thing
that I didn't say [laughs] and then you can leave.
It'll just take a second.
The Kentucky Arts Council, which granted us a partnership
for today's reading, is supported by tax dollars and also
by the National Endowment for the Arts.
They told me that I'd never get another grant
if I didn't say it, so.   [laughter]
[ Applause ]
Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.   Visit us at loc.gov.