>> Announcer: From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
[ Silence ]
>> Robert Dardano: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Please welcome the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James H. Billington.
[ Applause ]
>> Dr. James Billington: Thank you very much.
Good evening and welcome to this very special evening.
For some time, I had hoped that William Merwin would agree
to be Poet Laureate of the United States
and as the summer solstice approached this year,
the stars must have been in alignment because he did agree
and I'm happy that he's here tonight for his inaugural reading
as Poet Laureate of the United States.
For much of his life, William Merwin has cared about the natural world
in a deep and abiding way by planting an assortment of palms.
He has reforested a ruined pineapple plantation
where he and his wife now live.
I hope that he will speak to us, not just in person
in this historic place tonight but virtually
from the naturalistic place in his beloved Hawaii
in the course of his laureateship.
His surroundings have entered his poems.
The later poems contain a kind of meditative mist
like I imagine must come up in the mornings on Maui
where the poet lives and writes,
often about everyday things with his beloved wife.
Whatever its origin, the metaphorical mist feeds a fluid flow
of thought into his poems.
They have an almost magical capacity to escape the bounds of time
or at least to lengthen the present moment as in these lines
from a poem entitled, To the Middle,
so it appears that you are here always.
A stillness in the passage of days.
The stillness of days takes place in his poems.
They are printed free of punctuation now while most
of us are punctuating our lives by rushing
from one punctual appointment to another,
[ Laughter ]
In our noisy cities, even as time itself is slipping away
like beach sand receding underfoot as the tide goes out.
We're grateful for the quiet moments
that William Merwin's poems provide us.
It's a single honor for the Poet Laureate to have
as he had this afternoon, a conversation
with the President of the United States.
As Percy Bysshe Shelly said in defense of poetry,
and I'm quoting again, poetry reproduces the common universe
but it also purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity
which obscures from us the wonder of our being.
Our new Poet Laureate is a master craftsman of the poetic art.
He uses the English language well, perhaps in part
because he has translated great poetry with loving skill
from other European languages.
His poetic voice is as unique as the island on which he lives,
that small, flowering state in the midst of the boundless ocean
where our Far West meets the Asian Far East.
He blends luminous thinking from the East
into the literary structures of the West.
His voice periodically takes us back to those prehistoric times
when poetry was heard rather than read.
Yet, he speaks clearly to our own time and to all time,
leading us upstream from the flow of everyday things in life
to the half-hidden headwaters of wisdom about life itself.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Poet Laureate
of the United States, William S. Merwin.
[ Applause ]
>> William Merwin: Well, you heard something that I never heard
which was what Jim Billington just had to say about me.
[ Laughter ]
So I don't know whether I should be feeling vain or troubled but,
[ Laughter ]
I want to thank Professor Billington and everybody who's been responsible
for my being here this evening, first of all.
And everybody who's been responsible for this series
because it's an extraordinary thing and it does represent something
about our country that is often not represented.
And I want to thank Patricia Gray who has seen us
through the preparations of the past few months
and is a wonderful friend to have made.
And that everyone who's come to this reading because some of you, I know,
have come considerable distances and I'm honored by you having done that.
I want to start by reading a very short few pages of prose
and I'm reading them in prose rather than trying to make them
up as I go along which, you know, has its virtues
but also you always leave things out and forget them.
I just feel strongly about this.
Several months ago, when Professor Billington
and I were discussing the possibility of this occasion,
he asked me whether there was any particular theme that I would
like to invoke as an accompaniment to what I might say
about poetry and my own poetry.
And I answered it once without hesitation that there was one
and it would be what I think is the essential relation between poetry
and the living world in all its forms, that is its source
and sustenance and the source and sustenance
of the art, of all the arts.
I'm indebted to the South African friend and poet Breyten Breytenbach
for quoting to me some years ago, these words from a letter
of William Blake's who's a lifelong hero of mine.
Blake says in the letter, the tree which moves some to tears of joy is
in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.
Some see nature all ridicule and deformity
and by these I shall not regulate my proportions.
And some see nature, see no nature at all.
But to the eyes of the man of imagination,
nature is imagination itself.
I think this to me is a statement of the importance
of the Declaration of Independence.
I mean it's a clarification of something
that the species has been trying to get to for a long time.
And is in danger always of losing because, you know,
you never get your, you never own it.
You never possess it.   It's never sure.
More than 200 years later than Blake's statement,
I tend to be cautious about using words such as nature and environment
because to me, they usually suggest
that we are distinct from what they refer to.
But what about this imagination that Blake refers to, with such regard?
In the relatively brief history of the human self-image,
a number of attributes have been nominated sometimes intolerantly
as the single distinguishing characteristic that sets us apart
from an endogamous [assumed spelling] claim, renders us superior
to all other forms of life, animal or botanical.
One of these qualities is reason, we have been taught,
and another is language, both of which are defined only
by humans, from a human viewpoint.
There is the soul, sometimes termed immortal which is perhaps amorphous,
unique, indescribable and remains certainly unproven.
Each of these has been used to assert our sole right
to have dominion over, to dominate, exploit and destroy any
and every other form of life.
Yet each of the special qualities however defined seems
to me partial and dubious.
I've come to think that if there is a single capacity or trait
that distinguishes our species and is our true gift,
not as some exclusive development of ours but because of the persistence
of it in all present among us and the authority it assumes even
in the context of falsehood.
It must be the imagination and the capacity
to feel distress upon hearing of the abuse of a child in another country
or the torment of an animal one has never seen, to grieve at the fate
of polar bears and of the homeless in Darfur,
to rejoice in the happiness of others and surroundings and told
in another place or even in another time, in other lives.
And I think that this is our talent.   This is what is us.
And those of us who have had to do with the arts and I think
that must include a great many of the people in this room.
I think, realize that the talent that is given to us is saying
at the same time, use it.
Use it, honor it, respect it, make it part of your life,
because if you don't, it will turn against you.
And I think that what we're seeing now,
because we're seeing the exact opposite of what I'm talking about.
We're talking about greed and anger, running the world
and taking absolutely for granted.
And I think that's the opposite viewpoint.
I think that we have known about that in the myths as long
as there have been myths.
In the great Gilgamesh epic which was the first
of the great long epics that has survived, the great tree is, yes,
you can cut the great tree down.
The great tree which overshadows everything which was part
of everything which was a menace, which was both the menace
and the food of everything, you can cut it down.
But when you do cut it down, without knowing what the consequences are,
death comes into the world.   There was no death before that.
That's a great myth.
I mean that's something that I think if you once paid attention
to that, you'll never forget it.
And I don't think these are things that ever go away
and if we ignore them, we ignore them always with our peril.
I just wanted to say that in this context once, at this time,
in this century, because I think we must decide what we're going to do
with the time that is left to us, whether we're going to live
up to ourselves or whether we're not.
And nobody will miss us, you know.   [ Laughter ]
But in the meantime, the imagination that we've been talking
about made Mother Teresa and made Mozart, made Shakespeare
and made Albert Schweitzer.
This is exceptional but it's still us
and are we going to live up to that?
So I want to begin by quoting to you, a Japanese-American woman
in New Jersey and I have been working for ten years,
just in a rather dilatory way for awhile
but with a lot more excitement recently, translating the work
of the least known of the three great haiku poets, Japanese haiku.
I don't know any Japanese but I work with her.
She provides me with literals, with notes,
with every possible background and there's one that I just wanted
to quote here because I thought here we are.
He says, this is a haiku, remember, very, very short.
He said, vainly I listen for the voice of the cuckoo.
In the sky above the Capitol.   [ Laughter ]
So I want to start by going back and reading some poems
from a few years back, I mean 50 years back.
[ 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 is gone, I hear the stream running after it.
It has brought its flute.   It is a long way.
The Dream Again, these are some short poems
The Dream Again.
I take the road that bears leaves in the mountains.
I grow hard to see, then I vanish entirely.
On the peaks, it is summer.
I was trying in those years to get close to the base of poetry,
what makes poetry poetry.
One can never get to it and say I've got it.
I've found it.
This is the Pole and I can put up a flag.
No, no, that doesn't happen.
But of course, when the poems were reviewed, there were those who said,
oh well, this is a poet who doesn't want to be understood.
He's very incomprehensible.
But then I found that people were teaching them
to their second grade classes,   [ Laughter ]
And I said what do the children make of them?
Well, they like them.   [ Laughter ]
And I thought okay.   I thought that's fine.
The children know something their elders are still trying
to understand, you know.
And by the way, understanding, I want to keep going back to Blake
because he keeps coming up and to me, there are two prophets
to our world from that period.
One is Blake and one is an American, Henry David Thoreau.
And I keep going back to them.
I think they keep saying things that tell us who we are which is,
one of the other things that the imagination does all the time.
I mean Shakespeare's sonnets don't tell you anything
about Shakespeare's love life.   They tell you about your love life.
[ Laughter ]   How We are Spared.
In mid-summer, before dawn, an orange light returns
to the mountains like a great weight.
And the small birds cry out and bear it up.
[ Silence ]
And there's one more of these small poems I want
Hoeing the bean field, here are the dragonflies' wings.
From this spot, the wheat once signaled with lights.
It is all here with these feet on it, my own.
And the hoe in my shadow.   [ Silence ]
There's a different kind of poem all together that I want to read
when I find it, here called Fly.
It's about, these are animal poems and there are city poems.
I've had that kind of back and forth running through my life.
I was born in the city
and the moment I saw the country I wanted to be there.
And it took a long time but I was always,
I remember the first time I heard crows, when I was nine years old.
And I was surprised to find the tears running down my face.
What am I crying about?   I mean those birds.
I didn't know what the connection was but it was something about it
that was so powerful, the crows were.
Though this is a bird poem, a different kind called Fly.
I have been cruel to a fat pigeon because he would not fly.
All he wanted was to live like a friendly old man.
He let himself become a wreck, filthy and confiding,
wild for his food, beating the cat off the garbage, ignoring his mate,
perpetually snotty at the beak, smelling, waddling,
having to be carried up the ladder at night to tint.
Fly, I said, throwing him into the air but he would drop
and run back expecting to be fed.
I said it again and again, throwing him up as he got worse.
He let himself be picked up every time, until I found him
in the dove coop dead of the needless efforts.
So that is what I am.
Pondering as I that could not conceive
that I was a creature to run from.
I have always believed too much in words.
[ Silence ]
The poem I want to read called History
from a few years later than that.
It's in a different landscape all together from New York or from
where I live now, but I look back and I think, my God, I'm lucky.
The places I've seen and the places I've lived in
and I'm not a good tourist.
I mean I find tourism, it irritates me because if I'm interested in it,
I want to stay for awhile and if I'm not, if I just want to move on,
I get tired of doing that.
I think I might have well just go home, you know.
But somewhere that really interests me.
So I've lived places and I've gotten to know places and to remember them
with great fondness and remembering things
that I didn't notice at the time.
But this is one of those extraordinary places,
a sort of turning point in my life.
I lived in a very remote part of southwestern France.
History. Only I never came back.
The gate stands open where I left the barnyard and the evening
as the owl was bringing the mouse home
in the gold sky, at the milking hour.
And I turned to the amber hill and followed along the grave,
fallen wall by the small mossed oaks and the bushes
of rusting arches bearing the ripe blackberries into their long shadow.
I climbed the ancient road through the last songs of the blackbirds,
passing the last live farms, their stones running with dark liquid
and the ruined farms, their windows without frames, facing away,
looking out across the pastures
of dead shepherds whom nobody ever knew.
Growing high with the dried flowers of late summer.
Their empty doorways gazing toward the arms of the last oaks
and at night, their broken chimneys watching the cold of the meteors.
The beams have fallen together to rest in brown herds
around the fireplaces and in the shades of the black trees,
the houses were full of the owl fragrance at last, mushrooms
and owls and the song of the cicadas.
[ Silence ]
There was a note on a page made at the time and the book was closed
and taken on a journey into a country
where no one knew the language.
No one could read even the address inside the cover
and there the book was of course, lost.
It was a book full of words to remember.
This is how we mange without them.   This is how they manage without us.
I was not going to be long.   [ Silence ]
How many years ago now?   Nineteen years ago.
We had a great male Chow dog and he got out on the road one night
and someone enticed him with a hamburger, I suppose and got him
into a car and stole him.
And we were, it completely changed our lives.
We spent every day sort of doing a planning mission, what we were going
to do to look for him that day and we put up posters and so forth
and advertised and so on and did all that.
And finally got him back but it took,
there were some crucial and very searing weeks.
Then we were both obsessed and I think, you know,
artists pray to be obsessed but this was, I found myself going
around mumbling the same words over and over again
and thinking they don't make any sense, you know.
I'm so boring, I can't talk to anybody else
because there is only one thing I have on my mind now.
And after I got him back, I was thinking of those words
that I'd said over and over and I thought all my life, the poet whom I
in some ways loved most, was one of the most awful
of men, was Francois Villon.
And nobody could ever imitate Francois Villon
and I always thought, I used to have dreams that I'd found poems of mine
that were just like Francois Villon's.
[ Laughter ]   And I thought, you know, so much
for the academic theories about influence.
Nothing that I've ever written reminds anybody
of Francois Villon, you know.   [ Laughter ]
But this poem came out in the form of a poem of Francois,
a particular poem of Francois Villon's too.
And with some of the rhythms and many
of the other things of Villon's.
So I was indebted to him but it was about this nonsense,
saying the same thing over and over again.
By now, I know most of the faces that will appear beside me as long
as there are still images.
I know at least what I would choose the next time
if there ever was a time again.
I know the days that open in the dark like this.
I do not know where Mowley [assumed spelling] is.
I know the summer surfaces of bodies and the tips of voices like stars
out of their distances and where the music turns to noise.
I know the bargains and the news, rules, whole languages, formulas,
wisdom that I will never use.   I do not know where Mowley is.
I know what everyone may lose, somebody will be there
who says what it will be all right to miss
and what is verging on excess.
I know the shadows of the house, roots that lead out to no traces,
many of his empty places.   I do not know where Mowley is.
You that's seen now with your own eyes, all that is there
as you suppose, though I could stare through broken glass
and show you where the morning goes.
Though I could follow to their close,
the sparks of an exploding species and see where the world ends in ice.
I would not know where Mowley is.
Mowley is a Hawaiian word that means the Real McCoy.
[ Laughter ]
Your own thing, what really belongs there, you know.
You say your own words you use called [inaudible] mowley.
It means your own thing.
His own thing, he's the real guy, this is the real thing.
And he was.   He came back.
So let me read one other poem, that same kind of poem from that period
but of a different subject all together called One Story.
Always somewhere in the story, which up until now we thought was ours,
whoever it was that we were being then had to wander
out into the green towering forest, reaching to the end of the world
and beyond, older than anything whoever we were being
could remember.
And find there that it was no different
from the story, anywhere in the forest.
And never be able to tell as long as the story was there,
whether the fiery voices now far ahead, now under foot,
the eyes staring from their instant that held the story as one breath.
The shadows offering their spread flowers and the chill that leapt
from its own turn like through the hair of the nape,
like a light through the forest, knew the untold story all along
and were waiting at the right place as the moment arrived
for whoever it was to be led at last by the wilds
of ignorance through the forest.
And come before them face to face for the first time, recognizing them
with no names and again surviving, seizing something alive
to take home out of the forest.
But what came out of the forest was all part of the story.
Whatever died on the way was named but no longer recognizable,
even what vanished out of the story.
Finally, day after day was becoming the story.
So that when there is no more story that will be our story.
When there is no forest, that will be our forest.
I've been trying to say it but, then I'm going to start jumping
to end with some recent poems.
And I'm going to jump another ten years or so more
There is a war in the distance, with a distance growing smaller.
The field glasses lying at hand are for keeping it far away.
I thought I was getting better about that returning childish wish
to be living somewhere else that I knew was impossible.
And now I find myself wishing to be here,
to stay here, to be alive here.
It is impossible enough to still be the wish of a child.
In youth, I hid a boat under the bushes beside the water knowing I
would want it later and come back and would find it there.
Someone else took it and left me instead of the sound of the water
with its whisper of vertigo, terror, reassurance and old, old sadness.
It would seem we knew enough always about parting but we have to go
on learning as long as there is anything.
[ Silence ]
There's a whole book that was written about one place
where I lived for a number of, well, for a good bit of my life.
The book is called The Vixen and somewhere in here I should be able
to find the poems from it that I'm looking
for because I want to read that one poem.
Here it is.
The vixen runs all the way through that poem and I don't know how many
of you are fascinated by animals.
I'm fascinated by all kinds of animals but particularly among them,
foxes are very high on the list.
I think, and lots have been written about wolves
in the last hundred years but not very much about foxes.
They are very mysterious animals.   They're not like wolves at all.
In fact, they don't like each other.   This is addressed to the vixen.
Comet of stillness, princess of what is over.
High note held without trembling, without voice, without sound,
aura of complete darkness, keeper of the kept secrets
of the destroyed stories, the escaped dreams,
the sentences never caught and words.
Warden of where the river went, touch of its surface,
sibyl of the extinguished,
window unto the hidden place and the other time.
At the foot of the wall by the road, patient without waiting,
in the full moonlight of Autumn, at the hour when I was born,
you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me.
You're still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you.
Even now you're unharmed, even now perfect, as you have always been.
Now when your light paws are running on the breathless night,
on the bridge with one end, I remember you.
When I have heard you, the soles of my feet have made answer.
When I have seen you, I have waked and slipped from the calendars,
from the creeds of difference and the contradictions that were my life
and all the crumbling fabrications as long as it lasted
until something that we were had ended.
When you were no longer anything, let me catch sight
of you again going over the wall.
And before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures guttering
on a screen, let my words find their own places
I want to read a few poems from the Shadows series and then close
with some more recent poems.
The Shadows series is the most recent book.
[ Silence ]
In the middle of the central section of the book,
the shortest section, they're all short poems.
They're all elegies and I had to make it clear that they were elegies
about dogs which is, you know, more poems have been written
about dogs than you would believe.
But we don't ordinarily think about that.
And there are people who would say, oh, you shouldn't waste
that kind of feeling on animals.
As though anyone else can tell you what you should feel about anything
and as though you could decide about those things which,
of course, fortunately you can't.
My Dark. When it is 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.
This is a lullaby poem, Good-night.   Sleep softly, my old love.
My beauty in the dark.
Night is a dream we have and as you know, as you know.
Night is a dream you know, an old love in the dark around you
In the night where you go, sleep softly, my old love,
without end in the dark, in the love that you know.
And the third of these little elegy poems called 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 can 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 promised day, my time again, my homecoming,
my being where you wait for me.   I think always of you waiting.
In the months when I was writing those poems, there's a poem
that I had known, ever since I was at the university,
a Latin poem attributed to the Emperor Hadrian.
The only reason I question it and the scholars don't
but I can't believe, I find it hard to believe.
I'm sure it was Hadrian.
We don't know anything else about it.
We don't know who it may have been written for, to, to whom.
One translation says the dying emperor
to himself, to his soul and so on.   We don't know.
And I find it strange
that so remarkable a poem could have been the only poem
that anybody ever wrote,
that anybody ever wrote one poem and it was this one.
[ Laughter ]   But never mind that.
I don't know.   I simply don't know.
And I never, over the years, I read all the translations I could find
of it because I was fascinated by the poem.
I read French translations, and Spanish and Italian translations.
I thought none of them quite make sense.
And I have a great friend who's a very distinguished classicist
and one day, I was working in the garden.
One of the great things about working in the garden is
that you find it in a way, you don't seem to be thinking
about doing anything except moving this to there, you know,
and planting and digging that hole.   I think it's wonderful.
And all sorts of things can come out of that hole, you know.
And all of a sudden, this poem came into my mind in English
and I thought if I were to put it into English
which I had never thought of doing, that's the way I'd want to have it.
And I called up, I went into the house and called
up my classist friend and said, I've just translated that little poem
of Hadrian's and he said can you say it over the telephone?
And I did and he said it's absolutely literal.
[ Laughter ]   So here it is.
It's called Little Soul, Little Soul.
The first word of the poem is animula.
Anima is soul.
Animula is the diminutive, Little Soul.
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.
[ Conversation ]
I want to read two more poems out of this and then some later poems.
Paula is my wife, somewhere down there.
[ Laughter ]
Let me imagine that we will come again when we want
to and it will be Spring.
We will be no older than we ever were.
The worn griefs would have eased like the early cloud
through which the morning slowly comes to itself.
And the ancient offenses against the dead will be done with
and left to the dead at last.
The light will be as it is now in the garden,
that we have made here these years together,
of our long evenings and astonishment.
[ Silence ]
One more poem from that book called Rain Light.
All day the stars watch from long ago.
My mother said I am going now.
When you are alone, you will be all right.
Whether or not you know, you will know.
Look at the old house in the dawn rain.
All the flowers are forms of water.
The sun reminds 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 wake without a question,
even though the whole world is burning.
The more neatly one packs these things, the more messy they get
by the time you get to unpack them.   [ Laughter ]
I hope they don't fall all over the place.
[ Laughter ]   [ Silence ]
Young Man Picking Flowers.
All at once, he is no longer young with his hand full
of flowers in the bright morning.
Their fragrance rising from them as though they were still on the stalk
where they opened only this morning,
to the light in which somewhere unseen the thrush goes
on singing its perfect song, into the day of the flowers.
And while he stands there holding them, the cool dew runs from them
onto his hand at this hour of their lives.
Is it the hand of the young man who found them only this morning?
How beautiful you must be to have been able to lead me this far
with only the sound of your going away?
Heard once at a time and then remembered
in silence when the time was gone.
You whom I have never seen, oh, forever invisible one,
whom I have never mistaken for another voice,
nor hesitated to follow beyond precept and prudence, overseas
and deserts, you incomparable one, for whom the waters fall
and the winds search and the words were made listening.
A small poem called Dew Light.
Now in the blessed days of more and less, when the news about time is
at each day, there is less of it.
I know none of that as I walk out through the early garden.
Only the day and I are here with no before or after and the dew looks
up without a number or a present age.
Vicktenstein [assumed spelling] somewhere is supposed to have said,
that the true theme of all poets who remain poets
through their lives is homecoming.
I wish I knew where that quotation comes from
and I wish I knew exactly what he meant and I would love
to have heard what he might have said on that subject.
But it's an intriguing one and this is a poem called Homecoming.
Once only when the summer was nearly over and my own hair had been white
as the days' clouds for many years, for many more years
than I was counting, I stood by the garden at evening.
Paula was still weeding around flowers that opened after dark.
And I looked up to the clear sky and saw the new moon and at that moment,
from behind me, a band of dark birds and then another, another after it,
flying in silence, long, curving wings hardly moving.
The plovers, just in from the sea and the flight clear from Alaska,
half their weight gone to get them home.
But home now, arriving without a sound, as it rose to meet them.
[ Silence ]   Turning. Going too fast for myself,
I missed more than I think I can remember.
Almost everything it seems sometimes, and yet there are chances
that come back, that I did not notice when they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them.
This morning, the Belgian Shepherd dog, he's still young, looking up
and saying are you ready this time?
[ Laughter ]   Coming of Age.
It will not be enough to recall stills from along the way,
to glimpse from its hill the long, gone night pasture,
the light on the river but not the river,
the sunbeam on the scuffled stairs and the soundless house
but not where it was going.
The eyes of a dog watching from beside me,
a face and shadow silent as an old photograph.
Our meeting, our first night and waking
at home together again, I was there.
These same hands, these eyes as they were when they wondered
where it was going, where it had gone.
It will not be enough.   It will be enough.
[ Silence ]   I want to read two more poems.
This one's called, these are new and they're unpublished poems.
The Chain to Her Leg.
I don't know the ages of who I'm talking to.
And some people may not remember Topsy
and in this poem, that's not a good thing.
[ Laughter ]
Topsy was an elephant and I tell some of her story in the poem
but just so that you know what happened.
This was the year that Edison was testing the electric chair.
Topsy's mother had been shot in front of her in Africa
and Topsy had been taken away as a very small young elephant child.
And she lived in captivity all her life.
And she'd been variously treated.
She'd been brutally handled and mistreated sometimes.
Sometimes they had been kind people, sometimes not.
There was no reason to be particularly trusting
or affectionate to anybody she knew until she knew them very well.
And there was one keeper who badly mistreated her
at one point and she killed him.
You know, he got in her way and she just stepped on him.
And they thought, well, there was a lot of reason for that
at that time, he was a mean man.
And they let her go this time but years later, out in Coney Island,
some man fed her peanuts and fed her a lit cigarette
with the lit end first and she killed him.
She thought I've had that and she took her trunk,
you know, and broke his neck.
And that was that and they said well,
that's obviously first-degree murder and she must be executed.
And they decided that they would test out the electrical apparatus
for the electric chair on her and it was a mess.
It didn't work for a long time and it finally killed her.
And there's a photograph.
There's a documentary photograph of the film
of the whole thing if you're interested.
But I remember reading about Topsy when I was a child
and I never got her out of my mind.
I've never as you see, gotten her out of my mind.
[ Laughter ]   It's called The Chain to Her Leg.
If we forget Topsy, Topsy remembers.
When we forget her mother, gunned down in the forest and forget
who killed her and to whom they sold the tusks, the feet, the good parts,
and how they died and where and what became of their children,
and what happened to the forest, Topsy remembers.
When we forget how the wires were fastened on her
for the experiment the first time and how she smoldered
and shuddered there with them all watching but did not die,
when we forget the lit cigarette,
the last laugh gave her lit end first as though it were a peanut,
the joke for which she killed him, we will not see whom again.
When we forget the circus, the tickets to see her die in the name
of progress and Edison and the electric chair,
the mushroom cloud will go up over the desert where the West was won,
the Enola Gay will take off after the chaplain's blessing,
the smoke from the black maces power plants will be visible
from the moon, the forests will be gone.
The extinctions will accelerate, the polar bears will float farther
and farther away and off the edge of the world, the Topsy remembers.
[ Silence ]
I want to close with a poem that is a message to a,
I don't know any Chinese and yet, all my life that I can think of,
I've been reading Chinese poets.
I think we should remember when we think about translation,
that poetry in English and the English language since the beginning
of the 20th century would be unthinkable as it is
without translation, without Arthur Waley's and some
of Ezra Pound's translations from Chinese and the beginning
of a different way of hearing the English language
through the translation of Chinese.
And the more one gets to know the great poets from the beginning
of the Common Era into the Tang Dynasty and then the Song Dynasty
that followed of several amazing centuries, the connection
between those poets, the natural world, the world around them,
the way that they were dealing with the very things
that I've been talking about tonight and the way they were dealing
with the relation of poetry to language all together and to,
most of them were Chung Buddhists.
Some of them were, Du Fu was a Daoist
but these traditions too were very close to them
and they developed along with them.
And, you know, when one thinks of all the Golden Age, the Tang period
of China, and then you read a little bit about the history
and the Tang period was a nightmare.
You know, in the middle of it was the Lushan Rebellion
where 30 million people were either killed or displaced.
I mean this was the civil war was totally uncivil.
You thought, God, how can the same species have these poets
and painters, the whole origin of Chinese painting also came
in the same period, and this kind of behavior at the same time?
I don't know the answer to that.
I don't know how one can be happy on a day
when people are starving in Darfur.   I just don't know that.
I don't think anybody else does either.
It's not easy but it's not something you deal
with by shrugging it off either.
But anyway, this is called, this poem is addressed
to someone 1,000 years ago, a Chinese poet who's poems I've loved
in translation and about whom I'm fascinated, Po Chu-I.
A Message to Po Chu-I.
In the tenth winter of your exile, the cold never letting go of you
and your hunger aching inside you day
and night while you heard the voices
out of the starving mouths around you.
Old ones and infants and animals.
Those curtains of bones swaying on stilts and you heard the faint cries
of the birds searching in the frozen mud for something to swallow.
And you watched the migrants trapped in the cold.
The great geese growing weaker by the day
until their wings could barely lift them above the ground,
so that a gang of boys could catch one in a net
and drag him to market to be cooked.
And it was then that you saw him in his own exile and you paid for him
and kept him until he could fly again and you let him go.
But then where could he go, in the world of your time,
with its wars everywhere and the soldiers hungry, the fires lit,
the knives out, 1,200 years ago.
I have been wanting to let you know, the goose is well.
He is here with me.   You would recognize the old migrant.
He has been with me for a long time and is in no hurry to leave here.
The wars are bigger now than ever.
Greed has reached numbers that you would not believe
and I will not tell you what is done to geese before they kill them.
Now we are melting the very poles of the earth but I have never known
where he would go after he leaves me.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> Female Voice: Well, we came for an evening of poetry and words
and certainly we have received that.
But there's been a much deeper gift to touch our hearts
and our minds and some of it, our gut.
And we are, I think all of us deeply grateful and appreciative
but also excited that this is the beginning of poetry season.
And you'll have an opportunity to see and hear and live
with W.S. Merwin again in the course of the year.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
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