>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
>> Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Librarian
of Congress, Dr. James H. Billington.
[ Applause ]   >> Good evening and welcome all.
It's a great pleasure to welcome you all here to the library
and to this very special program.
This evening marks the publication of Poet Laureate Anthology,
a volume that brings together for the first time in print samplings
of poems by all the US poets laureate/consultants in poetry.
We're bringing together I think more poets laureate
that have probably ever read poetry together
at the one single event at one single place.
It is a-- indeed a rather special event tonight that is--
[inaudible] is looking forward towards the celebration in just
about a year and a half-- a little less than a year and a half
of what would be the 75th anniversary of the establishment
of the positions of poet/consultant at the Library of Congress,
and the entire high quality free poetry programs
that have ensued during the past 75 years [inaudible] of course
as the Poet Laureate/Consultant was renamed
with the added concept of the laureate.
Tonight's program is sponsored by the library's publishing office,
and the publishing partner for this anthology, W.W. Norton,
and by our Poetry Literature Center and the Poetry Society of America.
I will especially welcome all amending distinguished guests,
too many to mention in person, but we appreciate this very full house
and the distinguish people and the lovers of poetry that are
with us and are here tonight.
I wanna especially welcome Elizabeth Hun Schmidt,
editor of this anthology, who worked with the late Evelyn Sinclair
in the publisher office to produce this volume.
The anthology features some of the world's best known poems
and many new surprises by the 43 poets
who have served the library of the nation.
As Poet Laureate/Consultants in poetry, or as it was earlier termed,
Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress.
This is, I believe, the highest mandated national recognition
of literary of distinction
with a special congressional stamp on it in existence.
And use of time, we'll not doing lengthy introductions,
and we'll refer you instead to tonight's program
in a biographical paragraph, so to company each photograph.
All of them included tonight have become evangelists of poetry
in the nation, as well exemplars of the poetic crafts
and all its rich variety
as an existing [inaudible] here in America.
Now, it's with great pleasure that I turn to tonight's first reader,
a man who provided the introduction for the Poet's Laureate Anthology,
and as laureate, got many schools all over America
to broadcast poetry, not just in English class,
but with public daily announcements in schools or across the country.
So, ladies and gentlemen, in honor of all of our exemplars
and evangelists in various ways to America,
the first of the Poets Laureate/Consultant in poetry
for the United States, Mr. Billy Collins.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you very much.
It's a real thrill to be back here in sort
of my old stomping grounds at the library.
Also, thrilling to be part of this launch of this terrific anthology,
and congratulations--
my congratulations to Elizabeth Schmidt, the editor.
Also, quite amazing to be here with so many poets laureate.
And one thing you learn as a poet laureate is how
to make the plural of that.   Seven poets laureate tonight--
it made me think I asked Dr. Billington earlier
if he had any light bulbs to be changed
because I said we could do it, you know.
[ Laughter ]
>> We could get-- we would put our minds to it.
Now, the program we're asked to follow and happily do so is
to read a poem or two of another poet and then a few of ours.
And the poet I chose to read from is Howard Nemerov,
and I think I chose him because it was Howard Nemerov
and Karl Shapiro-- I always associate those two
because I read them-- discovered about the same time-- that--
who taught me, as some other poets had too, that it was okay to be--
to allow your sense of humor to enter poetry.
And I'm gonna read a poem by Howard Nemerov.
He was consultant in poetry 1963 to '64, and then be poet laureate
in '88 and '90, Howard Nemerov.
And the poem is-- it's called Money: An Introductory Lecture.
This morning, we shall spend a few minutes upon the study of symbolism,
which is basic to the nature of money.
I show you this nickel.
Icons and cryptograms are written all over it.
The nickel; one side shows a hunchbacked bison, bending his head
and curling his tail to accommodate the circular nature of money.
[ Laughter ]
>> Over him arches the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and squinched in between
that and his rump, E PLURIBUS UNUM--   [ Laughter ]
>> A Roman reminiscence that appears
to mean an indeterminately large number
of things all of which are the same.
Under the bison, a straight line giving him a ground
to stand on reads FIVE CENTS.
And on the other side of our nickel, there is the profile of a man
with long hair and a couple of feathers in the hair.
We know somehow that he is an American Indian,
and he wears the number 1936.
Right in front of his eyes, the word LIBERTY, bent to conform
with the curve of the rim,
appears to be falling out of the sky Y first.
The Indian keeps his eyes downcast and does not notice this.
To notice it, indeed, would be shortsighted of him.
So much for the iconography of one of our nickels,
which is now becoming a rarity and something of a collectors' item:
for as a matter of fact, there is almost nothing you can buy
with a nickel.
The representative American Indian was destroyed a hundred years
or so ago, and his descendants' relations
with liberty are maintained with reservations,
or primitive concentration camps; while the bison,
except for a few examples, kept in cages, is now extinct.
Something like that, I think, is what Keats must have meant
in his celebrated Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Notice, in conclusion, a number
of circumstances sometimes overlooked even by experts.
A, Indian and bison, confined to obverse and reverse sides
of the coin, can never see each other.
B, they are looking in opposite directions;
the bison past the Indian's feathers,
the Indian past the bison's tail.
C, they are upside down to one another.
D, the bison has a human face.
I hope that our studies today will have shown you something
of the import of symbolism with respect
to the understanding of what is symbolized.
[ Laughter ]   [ Applause ]
>> And now, I'll read a couple of poem that were included here.
And the first of mine, and the first one is--
it has an epigraph from W.B. Yeats from a journal of his
in which he expresses his typically exalted idea of the poet by saying,
"A poet never speaks directfully as to someone at the breakfast table."
And my poem takes issue with that.
It's called A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal.
[ Laughter ]
>> Every morning, I sit across from you at the same small table,
the sun all over the breakfast things, curve of a blue
and white pitcher, a dish of berries,
me in a sweatshirt or robe, you invisible.
Most days, we are suspended over a deep pool of silence.
I stare straight through you or look out the window at the garden,
the powerful sky, a cloud passing behind a tree.
There is no need to pass the toast, the pot of jam, or pour you a cup
of tea, and I can hide behind the paper rotate
in its drum of calamitous news.
But some days, I may notice a little door swinging open
in the morning air, and maybe the tea leaves
of some dream will be stuck to the china slope of the hour.
>> Then I will lean forward, elbows on the table, with something
to tell you, and you will look up, as always,
your spoon dripping milk, ready to listen.
And here's a little poem-- maybe I will have a drink--
a little poem called Sonnet.   I'm using up valuable time here.
[ Laughter ]
>> The other six are back there with stop watches I should tell you.
[ Laughter ]
>> So it's a little-- well, it's not a little poem.
It's got 14 lines.   It's called Sonnet.
All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen to launch a little ship
on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played and rhymes positioned
at the ends of lines, one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here wile we make the turn into the final six
where all will be resolved, where longing
and heartache will find an end, where Laura will tell Petrarch
to put down his pen, take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.
[ Laughter ]   [ Applause ]
>> Thank you.
And just one more poem called Forgetfulness.
Forgetfulness.
The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently
by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion,
the entire novel, which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of.
It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided
to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised
on the tip of your tongue, it is not even lurking
in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins
with an L as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion
where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim
and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date
of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Rita Dove.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you.
Good evening.
You look great out there those who I can see.
It is-- you should see the atmosphere in the back.
We're changing light bulbs and unchanging as we go.
It's really wonderful to be back here in the halls of the library,
and to have this occasion to read some poems by poets
that I have admired for years and whose poems are in this anthology.
I would like to begin by reading a poem by the Louise Bogan, I--
because she was, for me, quite seminal in terms of a quiet power
that I found in her poems.
And I would read this poem called Medusa.
I had come to the house, in a cave of trees, facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved-- a bell hung ready to strike,
sun and reflection wheeled by.
When the bare eyes were before me and the hissing hair,
held up at a window, seen through a door, the stiff bald eyes,
the serpents on the forehead formed in the air.
This is a dead scene forever now.   Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this, nor the rain blur.
The water will always fall, and will not fall,
and the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay deep on the ground.
And I shall stand here like a shadow under the great balanced sky,
my eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting
in the wind, and does not drift away.
[ Applause ]   [ Pause ]
>> I'll drink a little water while you clap to save some time.
Louise Bogan was consultant of poetry to the Library
of Congress in 1945 to 1946.
And in 1976, 1978, Robert Hayden took up that post.
The musicality, the blues, and the subtle irony and yet love
of his poems sustained me through all of my younger years
as a poet, and even today.
So I'd like to read the poem Homage to the Empress
Because there was a man somewhere in a candystripe silk shirt gracile
and dangerous as a jaguar, and because a woman moaned for him
in sixty-watt gloom and mourned him, "Faithless Love, Two-timing Love,
Oh, Love, Oh, Careless Aggravating Love."
She came out on stage in yards of pearls,
emerging like a favorite scenic view,
Because grey laths began somewhere to show
from underneath torn hurdygurdy lithographs of doll-faced in heaven,
and because there were those who feared alarming fists of snow
on the door and those who feared the riot squad of statistics,
she came out on the stage in ostrich feathers, beaded satin,
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you.
And I'll read a couple of my poems that are in the anthology.
This first one is-- was read at the inauguration
of the William Jefferson Clinton Library in Arkansas.
But it-- it pertains to, I think, libraries everywhere.
It's called This Life.
My grandmother told me there'd be good days to counter the dark ones,
with blue skies in the heart as far as the soul could see.
She said you could measure a life in as many ways as there were
to bake a pound cake, but you still needed real butter and eggs
for a good one-- pound cake, that is.
But I knew what she meant.
She was always talking around corners like that.
She knew words carried their treasures
like a grape clusters around its own juice.
She loved words.
She thought a book was a monument to the glory of creation
and a library-- well, sometimes just trying
to describe Jubilation will get you a bit tongue,
so let's leave it at that.
But my grandmother was nobody's fool,
and she'd tell anybody smart enough to listen,
"Don't let a little pain stop you.
>> Try as hard as you can every minute you're given,
or else sit down and shut up."
Though in her opinion, keeping quiet in noisy times was a sin
against everything God and democracy intended us for.
I know she'd like where I'm standing right now.
She'd say a man who could measure his life in deeds was larger inside
than the vessel that carried him.
She'd say he was a cluster of grapes.
My grandmother was only four feet ten, but when she entered a room,
even the books came to attention.   Giants come in all sizes.
Sometimes a moment is a monument.   Sometimes an institution breathes--
like a library, like this halcyon day.
[ Applause ]
>> And this one is from-- this is a first poem of my last book
which is book length-- study of biracial violinist prodigy who,
in his 20s, actually premiered Beethoven's Kreutzer sonata.
Beethoven wrote it for him and he permitted it
from one day to the next.   His named was George Bridgetower.
It's called The Bridgetower.   If was at the Beginning.
If he had been older, if he hadn't been dark, brown eyes ablaze
in that remarkable face; if he had not been so gifted,
so young a genius with no time to grow up; if he hadn't grown up,
undistinguished, to an obscure old age.
If the piece had actually been, as Kreutzer exclaimed, unplayable--
even after our man had played it, and for years no one else was able
to follow-- so that the composer's fury would have raged for naught,
and wagging tongues could keep alive the original dedication
from the title page he shredded.
Oh, if only Ludwig had been better-looking, or cleaner,
or a real aristocrat, von instead of the unexceptional van
from some Dutch farmer; if his ears had not already begun to squeal
and whistle; if he hadn't drunk his wine from lead cups,
if he could have found True Love.
Then the story would have held: In 1803, George Polgreen Bridgetower,
son of Freidrich Augustus, the African Prince,
and Maria Anna Sovinki of Biala in Poland, traveled from London
to Vienna where he met the Great Master who would stop work
on his Third Symphony to write a sonata for his new friend
to premiere triumphantly on May 24, whereupon the composer himself leapt
up from the piano to embrace his "lunatic mulatto."
Who know what would have followed?
They might have palled around some, just a couple of wild
and crazy guys strutting the town like rock stars, hitting the bars
for a few beers, a few laughs, instead of falling
out over a girl nobody remembers, nobody knows.
Then this bright-skinned papa's boy could have sailed his fifteen-minute
fame straight into the record books--
where instead of a Regina Carter or Aaron Dworkin
or Boyd Tinsley sprinkled here and there, we would find rafts
of black kids scratching out scales on their matchbox violins
so that some day they might play the impossible: Beethoven's Sonata No.
9 in A Major, Op.   47, also known as The Bridgetower.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you.
[ Applause ]   >> Please welcome, Daniel Hoffman.
[ Applause ]
>> What a pleasure to be in a Library of Congress reading again.
First time I did so was when I was consultant,
and that was 37 years ago.
I didn't know I was the poet laureate.
It was so called then.   So I've had to live with two titles.
[ Laughter ]   [ Pause ]
>> This great door stopper of a book, 700 pages
and several pounds-- what's it for?   Well, it's for two things.
First is to introduce you-- if you don't already know--
to the poetry that-- in these pages.
The second thing is for you not to stop there, but to carry on
and read books by the poets who are in the anthology,
spread out, read other things.   For instance, if you like the--
or don't like the poems by Richard Eberhart,
have a look at his collective poems and you'll poems such as A Wedding
on Cape Rosier, another title, The Human Being is a Lonely Person,
and the third title I'll mention, If I Could Only Live
at the Pitch That is Near Madness.
Well, I'm going to start by reading a poem by another poet
who preceded me and whose work I much admire,
and that's William Jay Smith.
Bill Smith, who was-- many of you probably raised your children
or were raised on his wonderful children's poems collected
in the volume Laughing Time.
But the poem I'm going to read is the title poem
on his recent collective poems for grownups,
and it's called The World below the Window.
The geranium-- the geranium I left last night on the window sill,
to the best of my knowledge now, are out there still, and will be there
as long as I think they will.
And will be there as long as I think that I can throw the window open
on the sky, a touch of geranium pink in the tail of my eye.
As long as I think I see, past leaves green-growing,
barges moving down a river, water flowing, fulfillment in the thought
of thought outgoing, fulfillment in the sight of sight replying,
of sound in the sound of small birds southward flying,
in the life life-giving, and in death undying.
[ Applause ]
>> Now, I'll read a couple of my own poems.
Here is one that when I had read to college audiences
in the last few years, I find I have to explain things in it
as though it were by Chaucer.   [ Laughter ]
>> Do you all know what is meant by the name Rin-Tin-Tin?
[ Laughter ]
>> How about the Ostrich Walk, a novelty dance of the 1920s
which is the title also of a record
with a marvelous solo Big Spider Beck.
Big Spider Beck famous Cornetto Silver-- and finally, Caligari.
Is there anyone here who have seen the movie the Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari?
It's a marvelous impressionist silent film
by Fritz Lang made in 1920.
Dr. Caligari is an ominous figure who arrives carrying a box
that contains a dybbuk, a dead ghoul,
and he is going to infect the world.
This is, of course, reflecting the losses of the First World War
and the influenza epidemic.
Well, okay, let's move ahead 20 years.
And we've had another war.
And but-- here, it's still 1920s, and in the days of Rin-Tin-Tin,
there was no such thing as sin, no boymade mischief worth God's wrath,
and the good dog dogged the badman's path.
In the nights, the deliquescent horn
of Bix gave the presentiments of the pleasures of sex.
>> In the Ostrich Walk, we walked by twos--
Ja-da, jing-jing, what could we lose?
The Elders mastered the market, Mah-jongg,
readily admitted the Victorians wrong, while Caligari hobbled
with his stick and his ghoul
and overtook the little fellow on his way to school.
Now, that little fellow could be Charlie Chaplin,
the figure of American Innocence, or it could be me.
[ Laughter ]
>> If you think about my little poem, it has the plot
of a novel by Henry James.   [ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
>> Well, we have that war, and then after that we have the Cold War,
and a number of you may well remember how scared we were
of weapons of mass destruction
that were not imagery as in the Iraq case.
[ Laughter ]
>> Well, I seem to have been struck by that, and by the conflict
between the way the world of nature with it's [foreign language]
of creatures just went on anyway compared
to the way we were reliving our history and our myths-- sorry.
This one is the Seals in Penobscot Bay.
The seals in Penobscot Bay hadn't heard of the atom bomb,
so I shouted a warning to them.
Our destroyer, on trial run, slid by the rocks
where they gamboled and played.
They must have misunderstood, or perhaps not one of them heard me
over the engines and tides, as I watched them over our wake,
I saw their sleek skins in the sun ripple,
light-flecked on the rock plunge, bubbling into the brine, and couple
and laugh in the troughs between the waves whitecaps and froth,
then the males clambered clumsily up and lustily crowed
like seacocks sure that their prowess held thrall all the sharks,
other seals and seagulls, and daintily flipped the females,
sea wenches with musical tails.
Each looked at the Atlantic as though it were her looking-glass.
If my warning had ever been heard,
it was sound none would now ever heed.
And I, while I watch those far seals tasted honey that buzzed in my ears,
and saw out to windward the sails of an obsolete ship with banked oars
that swept like two combs through the spray.
And I wished for a vacuum of wax to ward away all those strange sounds,
yet I envied the sweet agony of him who was tied to the mast,
when the boom, when the boom,
when the boom of guns punched dark holes in the sky.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you.
I find an abiding theme in my work, as well as attention
to nature is attention to human nature, the human nature
that leads us to have wars and that leads to violence,
both domestic and international.
There is a strain of violence in American culture--
American political culture, which is manifesting itself again this year,
but it's nothing new.
Some of you will remember before an earlier election not too long ago,
assassination seemed as American as apple pie.
I tried to get inside the mind of someone
who could do a thing like that.
Power. My life is one-billionth part of history.
I wish I was dead.
He rips the page from his notebook, litter in a rented room.
The neighbors will barely remember his silence when they said, "Hello."
They'll not forget his odd smile.   Nobody comes to see him.
When he thinks of his folks, he smiles oddly.
It was broken, but was it a home?
At night, the wet dream, arising he is afraid of women.
In his notebook, power over people, his job,
scouring pots in a hash house.   At last, he will pick up a girl.
She'll think, "Does he ever need love?
But I don't like him at all.
Her mom will hang up on his phone call."
One day he fondle a snob-nosed pistol deep in his pants.
What is his aim?
The TV. Even bumper stickers remind him who has the face and the name,
his name and smile will replace.   His trigger will make him bigger.
He will become victim.
When he steps from his rented room history, is in his hand.
[ Applause ]
>> I wrote a poem about two guys having a fight.
And then-- and I read that at meeting like this in Philadelphia.
And then after that, I wrote a poem
about how they read it at that meeting.
And this the second of the two poems, and it's called Violence.
And I ask you to think whether it's
about violence or is it about poetry.
After I'd read my poem about a brawl between two sidewalk hustlers--
one, insulted, throws the other down and nearly kills him--
over coffee and cookies a grave senior citizen reproved me,
"How could you see such violence and you didn't try to stop them?"
Oh, I explained, "It wasn't like that, really.
I saw two guys in a shoving match and thought I'd write
about aggression, what anger really feels like."
"Yes, and if the one got killed, it would be on your head.
You should've stopped them," he said.
[ Laughter ]   [ Applause ]
>> Just two more.
I've spoken about elections and I've written a poem an election,
and it called Owed to Dejection.   Owed is spelled O-W-E-D.
[ Laughter ]   >> The way the one who oh
so narrowly won the election bestows dejection upon the one
who oh so nearly won.
The election leaves him as a suitor about to elope is left
with reservations for a double and no hope in his new role
as unloved lover with no other career opening, yet in dreams,
determined, ardent, still he woos her though she turn her face
from his embrace as adamant in rejection as the crowd
that spurns the loser of an election.
[ Applause ]
>> Well, there, of course, the simile or metaphor is
that the candidate falls in love with the crowd and tries to woo it.
But I have a love poem that is a real love poem.
And this is to my late wife, Elizabeth McFarland,
who is also a poet and a distinguished poetry editor.
Reasons. Because when our clothes hung from the slanting alders,
and summer the color of stream on wavering sand poured
from the clouds, you waded under light-flecked glades reflected
in the water and repealed our exile from the garden; because seeing you
of a sudden in the crowd on Chestnut Street, the heedless,
thoughtless plod of my heart was seized, and stilled,
suspended in another life, until the beat of blood and breath resumed;
because while you're asleep,
the rhythm of your breathing sifts the air
with a dark-flowered enticement.
Because when I groped through lightless labyrinths of despair,
the unbroken thread of your love guides me back.
Because I cannot think of life without you but as a season of ice
and pain, of hunger without end;
because in the candle mold I gave you 30 years ago,
you've placed bouquets and pearly everlasting.
[ Applause ]   >> Please welcome Maxine Kumin.
[ Applause ]
>> Like Danny Hoffman, the last time I stood
at this podium, I was a mere consultant.
[ Laughter ]
>> And then by fiat, I became a laureate.
I just wanna say that this-- I know this house is full,
and I think the fact that we can fill a house like this is a tribute
to the fact that poetry is alive and well in Washington DC.
[ Applause ]   >> Okay, thank you.
Okay. I'm gonna read of Josephine Jacobsen.
I had the great good fortune to get to know Josephine here
in Washington, and we remained good friends 'til the end of her life.
A little poem I've chosen is called Gentle Reader.
Late in the night when I should be asleep under the city stars
in a small room, I read a poet.   A poet: not a versifier.
Not a hot-shot ethic-monger, laying about him; not a diary of lying
about in cruel, cruel beds, crying.   A poet, dangerous and steep.
Oh God, it peels me, juices me like a press; this poetry drinks me,
eats me, gut and marrow until I exist in its jester's sorrow,
until my juices feed a savage sight
that runs along the lines, bright as beasts' eyes.
The rubble splays to dust: city, book, bed,
leaving my ear's lust saying like Molly, yes, yes, yes, oh yes.
[ Applause ]
>> This-- I'm gonna read very autobiographical poem.
You'll have to flip back a couple of seasons.
It's called Seven Caveats in May.   When the dog whines at 5 AM,
do not make your first mistake and let him out.
When he starts to bark in a furious tom-tom rhythm
and you can just discern a shadowy feinting taking place
under the distant hemlocks, do not seize the small sledge
from the worktable and fly out there in your nightgown
and unlaced high tops preparing to whack this, the ninth of its kind
in the last four weeks, over the head before it can quill
your canine.
But it's not a porcupine: it's a big, black, angry bear.
[ Laughter ]
>> Now your dog has put him up a tree and plans to keep him there,
a perfect piece of work by any hound.
Do not run back and grab the manure fork--
[ Laughter ]
>> -- thinking you can keep the prongs between you
and the elevated bear long enough to dart in and corral your critter.
Isn't it true, bears come down slower than they go up?
Half an hour later, do not give up, go in the house and call the cops.
The dispatcher regrets having to report there's no patrol car
at this time, the state police are covering.
No doubt, the nearest trooper,
wearing his Smoky Bear Stetson is forty miles up the highway.
When your closest neighbor, big burly Smitty,
works his way into his jeans and roars up your dirt road
in his four-wheel diesel truck strides over the slash pile
and hauls your hound back, by now, you've thrown something
on over your not-quite-diaphanous nightgown.
[ Laughter ]
>> Do not forget to thank him with a sixpack.
[ Laughter ]   >> Do not fail to take your feeders
in on April 1 despite the arriving birds' insistent clamor,
and do not put them out again until the first of December.
[ Laughter ]   [ Applause ]
>> Alright.   This is a serious poem.
It's called Fat Pets On.
I wrote this poem many years ago, back-- I think it was in the 1990s.
As I remember it, these poor souls locked
up in various international airports around the world,
were still then a small minority
of the refugees risking deportation and death today.
So I revised the next of the last stanza to reflect that change,
and I'm going to read the revision.   Fat Pets On.
I am trying to palindrome out of the stencil, nose-stepped aft
as we sit on the tarmac in Geneva.
It says "don't tread on me," at least not
on this tender lifting place where ice glistens along the wing
like juice betting a slice of melon.
I toy with Fat Pets On while the intercom announces
that takeoff is delayed.
Long ago, before plexiglas, before terrorists, each time we parted
at the international gate, we could still touch fingers,
talk across the token latus that divided a rival from intransit
in Boston, Brussels, Singapore.
Daughter, now at the boarding call, limbo sets in.
One more farewell.
Eyes forward, we turn from each other back the disciplined way we
came, you with your briefcase and UN passed, I humbler than that,
a visiting mother carried by moving steps to my plane whose destination
after [inaudible] where I will transfer to a jumbo jet is to refuel
in Abu Dhabi, home of 20 refugees in orbit.
Those intercept whose costly black marked--
whose costly black market papers are not in order, people who cannot come
in from place of origin and steadfastly refuse to back to.
Month after month, they languished,
locked inside for throbbing airport hotels at Zaventem in Brussels,
Schiphol in Amsterdam, in Belgrade, Copen Hagen, Bucharest.
In bare bones accommodations, in a limbo of house arrest,
they suffer a continuum of nightmares in which, shackled,
they are returned to death squads or 20 years in hardship prison.
Meanwhile, I ride the current of time backward, fat pets on,
suspended in a calm cocoon with nanny brisk attendance
to pamper the paid-up overfed.   They bare hot towels, hard rolls,
a Russian of double rich swiss chocolate, to all of us locked,
kissed, and safely set down at birth in a privileged nation.
[ Applause ]
>> I'm only gonna read one more poem.
I was gonna read two, but I'm cutting it short
because I know my colleagues in-- offstage are waiting for their term.
This is called the The Revisionist Dream,
and it's in memory of the late Anne Sexton.
The Revisionist Dream.
And I wanted to say too, it's a villanelle, for those of you
who are aware of these things.   It's always nice to know that.
Well, she didn't kill herself that afternoon.
It was a mild day in October, we sat outside over sandwiches.
She said she had begun to practice yoga, take piano lessons,
rewrite her drama rife with lust and pride,
and so she didn't kill herself that afternoon, hugged me, went home,
cranked the garage doors open, scuffed through the garish leaves,
orange and red, that brought on grief.
She said she had begun to translate Akhmatova,
her handsome Russian piano teacher rendering the word-for-word
so she didn't kill herself that afternoon.
She cooked for him, made quiche and coq au vin.
He stood the Czerny method on its head while her fingers flew.
She said she had begun accelerandos, Julia Child,
and some expand-a-lung deep breaths to do in bed
so she didn't kill herself that afternoon.
We ate our sandwiches.   The dream blew up at dawn.
Thank you all very much.   [ Applause ]
>> Please welcome Kay Ryan   [ Applause ]
>> It feels unfair to be back to soon.
[ Laughter ]
>> And wonderful to not be here alone,
but to surrounded by other laureates.
It's kind of lonely up here trying to entertain people
for a whole hour by your self.
I think this is a remarkable anthology,
and I enjoyed looking through it very much.
And I thought about reading poems that I wasn't very familiar with,
but I decided to settle on my dear old favorite William Carlos Williams
and his wonderful poem Danse Russe, which is a poem I, for many years,
had upon my bulletin board.
And I even had a little illustration.
I drew picture of a naked man dancing with tears spinning out,
and a moon in the background.
Didn't look like Williams, so it was kinda chubby.
So here is his poem.
And I think that this-- I found great consolation thinking
about this poem, and I do to this day.
This kind of relationship, I sort of enjoy with others,
sort of mutual loneliness.   [ Laughter ]
>> Danse Russe.
If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees--
if I in my north room dance naked,
grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself, "I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely.   I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks,
buttocks against the yellow drawn shades--
who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?
[ Laughter ]   [ Applause ]
>> Now, among my poems, I'd like to begin with a protest poem.
I'm not known really for protest poems,
but this one is protesting against--
I suppose we would call it naturalism, or the [inaudible].
Wherever the flamingo goes, she brings a city's worth of furbelows.
She seems unnatural by nature-- too vivid and peculiar a-structured
to be pretty, and flexible to the point of oddity.
Perched on those legs, anything she does seems like an act.
Descending on her egg or draping her head along her back, she's too exact
and sinuous to convince an audience she's serious.
The natural elect, they think, would be less pink,
less able to relax their necks, less flamboyant in general.
They privately expect that it's some poorly jointed bland grey animal
with mitts for hands whom God protects.
[ Laughter ]   [ Applause ]
>> This poem shares the same title as Rita Dove's poem.
She read a poem called This Life,
so I'm going head to head with Rita here.
[ Laughter ]
>> You know, we poems-- we poets exhaust things after a while.
You know, we just have to start-- we have to recycle materials a lot.
It's a pickle, this life.
Even shut down to a trickle it carries every kind of particle
that causes strife on a grander scale: to be miniature is
to be swallowed by a miniature whale.
Zeno knew the law that we know: no matter how carefully diminished,
a race can only be half finished with success;
then comes the endless halving of the rest--
the ribbon's stalled approach,
the helpless red-faced urgings of the coach.
[ Applause ]
>> This poem is a little contemplation of force,
turning it this way and then turning it that way.
I do not like force for the most part-- and it starts that way.
Nothing forced works.
The Gordian knot just worsens if it's jerked at by a person.
One of the main stations of the cross is patience.
Another, of course, is impatience.
There is such a thing as too much tolerance for unpleasant situations,
a time when the gentle teasing out of threads ceases to be pleasing
to a woman born for conquest.
Instead she must assault the knot or alp or Everest with something sharp,
and take upon herself the moral warp of sudden progress.
[ Applause ]
>> We poets also use things near at hand to write about, you know,
Billy chooses cups and breakfast tables and that sort of thing.
I tend to lean on doubt, you know, as a-- always available material.
[ Laughter ]   >> A renewable, you know.
So this is a little disquisition on doubt.
It has a fixed science fact in it.   I think you'll see it.
I like the texture of facts, but I don't care
about them, you know, or--   [ Laughter ]
>> Doubt. A chick has just so much time to chip its way out,
just so much egg energy to apply to the weakest spot
or whatever spot it started at.   It can't afford doubt.
Who can? Doubt uses albumen at twice the rate of work.
One backward look by any of us can cost what it cost Orpheus.
Neither may you answer the stranger's knock;
you know it is the Person from Porlock who eats dreams for dinner,
his napkin stained the most delicate colors.
[ Applause ]
>> This poem talks about relief, also one of my favorite sensation.
I think it should be installed
with the great emotions; love, sorrow, relief.
[ Laughter ]   >> Relief.
We know it is close to something lofty.
Simply getting over being sick or finding lost property has
in it the leap, the purge, the quick humility of witnessing a birth--
how love seeps up and retakes the earth.
There is a dreamy wading feeling to your walk inside the current
of restored riches, clocks set back, disasters averted.
>> This is my wedding poem.
Also kind of a surprise to people that I have written.
And it was a surprise to me to find that it was one,
because it's called A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float
on Pure Water.
And that's a line from Ripley's Believe it or Not.
But this has been used at several weddings.
Who hasn't seen a plain ordinary steel needle float serene
on water as if lying on a pillow?   The water cuddles up like Jell-O.
It's a treat to see water so rubbery, a needle so peaceful,
the point encased in the tenderest dimple.
It seems so simple when things
or people have modified each other's qualities somewhat;
we almost forget the oddity of that.   [ Applause ]
>> You know, when your poems are short as mine are,
the clapping really eats into the poem time doesn't it, you know?
[ Laughter ]   >> I hadn't thought of that before.
This is a rather frightening poem to me.
It's called A Hundred Bolts of Satin.
All you have to lose is one connection
and the mind uncouples all the way back.
It seems to have been a train.   There seems to have been a track.
The things that you unpack from the abandoned cars cannot sustain life:
a crate of tractor axles, for example, a dozen,
dozen clasp knives, a hundred bolts of satin--
perhaps you specialized more than you imagined.
[ Applause ]   >> Two more.
This is called Home to Roost, and in it, it uses the conceit
of flying chickens which deceives people into thinking that it's going
to be funny at first, but it sort of flies south.
Home to Roost-- and I'm sure that I was, you know-- the--
your chicken are coming home to roost.
I'm sure that I was thinking when I wrote it
that I had been very foolish in some of the choices, there are a number
of them, and they were coming to ruse at me.
Most of the things we say to ourselves are sort of miniature
in that way, and of course, the chickens that come home
to roost are always bad chickens, you know.
[ Laughter ]
>> It's never the chickens of your good deeds, is it, you know?
[ Laughter ]   >> Home to Roost.
The chickens are circling and blotting out the day.
The sun is bright, but the chickens are in the way.
Yes, the sky is dark with chickens, dense with them.
They turn and then they turn again.
These are the chickens you let loose one at a time
and small-- various breeds.
Now they have come home to roost-- all the same kind at the same speed.
[ Applause ]
>> Here is a final and cheerful poem.
I'd like to tell you how you suppose to feel before you--
[ Laughter ]
>> -- before you go off the rails, you know.
Odd Blocks.
Every Swiss-village calendar instructs
as to how stone gathers the landscape around it,
how glacier-scattered thousand-ton monuments
to randomness become fixed points in finding home.
Order is always starting over.
And why not also in the self, the odd blocks, all lost and left,
become first facts toward which later a little town looks back?
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> Please welcome Charles Simic.   [ Applause ]
[ Pause ]   >> Hi. Good evening.
It's very nice to be back in Washington
in such illustrious company,
and with this huge anthology full of goodies.
And I will read 4 poems, 3 of mine and 1 by a poet
who has been dead a long time, Louise Bogan, and stuck with one
of my poems which appropriately is called In the Library.
In the Library.
There's a book called A Dictionary of Angels.
No one has opened it in fifty years.
I know, because when I did, the covers creaked, the pages crumbled.
There I discovered the angels were once
as plentiful as species of flies.
The sky at dusk used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms just to keep them away.
Now the sun is shining through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled in dark unopened books.
The great secret lies on some shelf Miss Jones passes every day
on her rounds.
She's very tall, so she keeps her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.   I hear nothing, but she does.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> This is a short poem by Louise Bogan called Cartography.
As you lay in sleep, I saw the chart of artery and vein running
from your heart, plain
as the strength marked upon the leaf along the length, mortal and brief.
Of your gaunt hand, I saw it clear: the wiry brand of the life we bear,
mapped like the great rivers that rise beyond our fate
and distant from our eyes.   [ Applause ]
>> I think Louise would appreciate that.
This is a poem called My Beloved.
It's actually-- most of these poems [inaudible] anthology of old poems,
but-- I don't even remember when this was written.
Maybe 30 years ago, whatever.
And I was confronted by the problem that poets who--
I read a love poem-- have had, for you know, at least 23 centuries
by my account, and that is you know, how to compare--
to find new comparisons for your beloved, you know,
beauty of her eyes or lips, chin, chest, I mean, whatever, you know.
[ Laughter ]
>> And they were really conscious, you know--
Greeks were really conscious that, you know, of this stuff, I mean,
because all the great comparisons, similes
and so forth, were already used up.
So-- and so was I many, many centuries later,
and so, the poem by My Beloved.
In the fine print of her face, her eyes are two loopholes.
No, let me start again.   [ Laughter ]
>> Her eyes are flies in milk, her eyes are baby Draculas.
To hell with her eyes.   [ Laughter ]
>> Let me tell you about her mouth.   [ Laughter]
>> Her mouth's the red cottage where the wolf ate grandma.
[ Laughter ]   >> Ah, forget about her mouth.
Let me talk about her breasts.
I get a peek at them now and then, and even that's more
So I better tell you about her legs.   When she crosses them on the sofa,
it's like the jailer unwrapping a parcel,
and in that parcel is a Christmas cake,
and in that cake a sweet little file
that gasps her name as it files my chains.
[ Laughter ]   >> Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> And finally, a poem called Prodigy.
It's about chess, but it's-- I think in some ways, it's about poetry.
At least I thought so when I wrote it.
When I was a kid, I played very good chess.
I don't anymore, alas, but-- anyway.
So it kind tells the story of the-- my glory days.
Prodigy. I grew up bent over a chessboard.
I loved the word endgame.   All my cousins looked worried.
It was a small house near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks shook its windowpanes.
A retired professor of astronomy taught me how to play.
That must have been in 1944.
In the set we were using, the paint had almost chipped off the
black pieces.
The white King was missing and had to be substituted for.
I'm told but do not believe that that summer,
I witnessed men hung from telephone poles.
I remember my mother blindfolding me a lot.
She had a way of tucking my head suddenly under her overcoat.
In chess, too, the professor told me, the masters play blindfolded,
the great ones on several boards at the same time.
I thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> Please welcome Mark Strand.   [ Applause ]
>> It's nice to be back.
I was a poet laureate when I was 7 years old.
[ Laughter ]   >> Well, that was 20 years ago.
When I was here, the poet Anthony Hecht was alive,
and he and his wife are very generous to me and welcomed me
to Washington, and I'd like to read a poem of Tony Hecht called A Hill.
In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur, I had a vision once--
though you understand it was nothing at all like Dante's, or the visions
of saints, and perhaps not a vision at all.
I was with some friends, picking my way
through a warm sunlit piazza in the early morning.
A clear fretwork of shadows from huge umbrellas littered the pavement
and made a sort of lucent shallows
in which was moored a small navy of carts.
Books, coins, old maps, cheap landscapes
and ugly religious prints were all on sale.
The colors and noise like the flying hands were gestures of exultation,
so that even the bargaining rose to the ear like a voluble godliness.
And then, where it happened, the noises suddenly stopped,
and it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved
and even the great Farnese Palace itself was gone, for all its marble;
in its place was a hill, mole-colored and bare.
It was very cold, close to freezing, with a promise of snow.
The trees were like old ironwork gathered
for scrap outside a factory wall.
There was no wind, and the only sound
for a while was the little click of ice as it broke
in the mud under my feet.
I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge, but no other sign of life.
And then I heard what seemed the crack of a rifle.
A hunter, I guessed; at least I was not alone.
But just after that came the soft and papery crash
of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.
And that was all, except for the cold and silence that promised
to last forever, like the hill.
Then prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored
to the sunlight and my friends.
But for more than a week I was scared
by the plain bitterness of what I had seen.
All this happened about ten years ago,
and it hasn't troubled me since, but at last, today,
I remembered that hill; it lies just to the left of the road north
of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy I stood before it
for hours in wintertime.   [ Applause ]
>> The poem I've always liked since I first read it--
of course, I have never read it-- I was gonna say written out aloud.
I wish I had.
I've never read it loud, so I'm gonna try now.
You're gonna be the guinea pigs.
This is a poem by Robert Lowell called Fall 1961.
Back and forth, back and forth goes the tock, tock, tock of the orange,
bland, ambassadorial face of the moon on the grandfather clock.
All autumn, the chafe and jar of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
I swim like a minnow behind my studio window.
Our end drifts nearer, the moon lifts, radiant with terror.
The state is a diver under a glass bell.
A father's no shield for his child.
We are like a lot of wild spiders crying together, but without tears.
Nature holds up a mirror.   One swallow makes a summer.
It's easy to tick off the minutes, but the clockhands stick.
Back and forth!
Back and forth, back and forth-- my one point of rest is the orange
and black oriole's swinging nest!   [ Applause ]
>> Now, I'm gonna read two poems of my own, both quite old.
That doesn't mean to say that I wouldn't write these poems again,
but it's highly unlikely.   [ Laughter ]
>> Pot Roast.   Both poems have to do with eating.
Pot Roast.
I gaze upon the roast that is sliced and laid out on my plate,
and over it, I spoon the juices of carrot and onion.
And for once, I do not regret the passage of time.
I sit by a window that looks on the soot-stained brick of buildings
and do not care that I see no living thing--
not a bird, not a branch in bloom, not a soul moving
in the rooms behind the dark panes.
These days, when there is little to love or to praise,
one could do worse than yield to the power of food.
So I bend to inhale the steam that rises from my plate,
and I think of the first time I tasted a roast like this.
It was years ago in Seabright, Nova Scotia.
My mother leaned over my dish and filled it.
And when I finished, filled it again.
I remember the gravy, its odor of garlic and celery,
and sopping it up with pieces of bread.
And now, I taste it again.   The meat of memory.
The meat of no change.   I raise my fork and I eat.
[ Applause ]
>> This poem is a poem I wrote almost 50 years ago.
I wanna say when I was 7 years old, not true.
Then it's only appropriate that I read it here
in the Library of Congress.   Eating Poetry.
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.   I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.   The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams.
I am a new man, I snarl at her and bark,
[ Applause ]   >> Please welcome the Director
of the Office Scholarly Programs, Dr. Carolyn T. Brown.
[ Applause ]   >> It is my unenviable privilege
to bring this wonderful program to a close.
I would like to thank all of those
who made this most amazing evening possible; our volunteers,
especially Vince's office, music division,
and all the others behind these scenes whom don't see.
I would, especially though, this evening, like to thank Patricia Gray
who is head of the poetry
and literature program and a poet herself.
[ Applause ]   >> And where Patricia is?
There she is.   [ Applause ]
>> She'll be back.   Patricia is retiring after 26 years,
and after 4-1/2 years heading the Poetry and Literature Center
and expanding our audiences and bringing her--
both her meticulousness and her amazing creativity
to the program She is the one responsible most fully
for organizing this most wonderful event tonight.
Before we proceed to the reception, which will be upstairs
in the Mezzanine at the-- of the Great Hall,
I would like to call Patricia back on the stage,
I'd like to ask Dr. Billington to please come forward,
and to all of our poets laureate to please come to the stages
so we can give you one last full and glorious thanks for this special,
special, special evening.   Please come forward.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you for coming.
Please join us upstairs for the reception.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.