>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Pause ]
>> Thank you very much, and good evening.
As Librarian of Congress, I have had the opportunity to select 16
of our 18 Poets Laureate, Consultants in Poetry.
The process is always thorough and includes nominations from critics,
scholars, editors, leaders in the field, and, of course, poets,
including our own former Poets Laureate.
This year's nomination process yielded 60 serious nominees,
and after much consideration, I was thrilled to call Philip Levine
and ask him to be our eighteenth Poet Laureate of the United States.
Mr. Levine is one of America's most celebrated practitioners
of literature in a career that has spanned over 50 years.
He has published 20 books of poetry, three books of essays,
and two books of translation.
His many honors include the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book awards,
two National Book Critic Circle awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize,
Fellowships for the Guggenheim Foundation
and the National Endowment for the Arts.
He served as Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets,
and is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters
and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He's also largely responsible for the development
of the Fresno School, a group of award-winning poets who studied
under Mr. Levine during his many decades as a professor
at the California State University there.
What such honors, while such honors are part
of the reason Mr. Levine has received so many nominations
for the laureateship, they are not why I selected him
or why he is such an essential poet.
They are the result, not the cause, if you like.
In the selection of Mr. Levine as in the selection
of other poets laureate, we ultimately turned
to the greatest power of poetry to connect intimately to each reader
through language that opens up new possibilities and contends
with the way we all make meaning of our lives.
One of the signature strengths of his poetry is the way it elevates
and celebrates the labors of America's working people.
I believe in the dignity of work, and I have worked hard
through my days in Philadelphia school system, public school system
to 25 years almost serving Congress
and the American people here in the Library.
So I admire Mr. Levine opening up a whole different range
of work experience, the Detroit factory
of workers whose stories he's immortalized,
and value the way his poems connect with the lives
of people we might not otherwise get to know.
The storytelling is key through it.
And we knew we had a Noble Laureate here not long ago
who coined a phrase, which I've always remembered.
He was a neuroscientist, and he said, you know,
the human mind is wired for narrative.
And it's a beautiful thought that we all crave stories.
We hear them when we're young.
We rediscover them when we're older, and Mr. Levine's stories are things
that really are worth valuing.
Through it, Mr. Levine avoids theorizing.
He allows his poems to be fundamentally moral
and transformative without being moralistic or patronizing.
He is a distinctly American voice singing in plain,
spoken language even as it asks us to, as the quote goes,
stand in the silence above your life, end of quote.
In poem after poem, he celebrates the richness
of the American creative experience and spirit,
a richness of William Carlos Williams captured in his search
for a pure American idiom, and Walt Whitman captured
in his declaration, "I contain multitudes."
Mr. Levine's poem, "You Can Have It," offers a take
on that famous line of Whitman as the narrative states,
and I'm quoting here, "Suddenly I knew each man has one brother
who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face his life,
and that together, they are only one man sharing a heart
that always labors, hands, yellow and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?"
The ultimate story of his poetry involves faith in asking
such questions without simple answers,
facing difficult challenges, yet also proudly speaking to the kind
of belief in each other that keeps us going together as Americans,
whatever we do and wherever we do it.
This kind of poetic work has helped broaden the reach or the range
of the poetic art, and we could not be more proud
that he continues the nearly 75-year tradition of the Poetry Consultant
and Poet Laureate Consultant of the United States here
at the Library of Congress.
Please join me in welcoming Philip Levine.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you.
Thank you for that generous introduction.
I would like to thank a number of people.
First, James Billington, for having the courage
Hopefully, he will not be tested.
And I thank Rob Casper, his lieutenant,
who has already been tested
and has proven enormously helpful and inspiring.
Let me pretend for a moment that I'm a star, and thank my agent --
we're at the Academy Awards --
Alison Granucci, who plans to make me rich, but will fail [laughter].
It is customary at an event like this to thank the spouse.
At the celebration in the Great Hall at Cooper Union at my retirement
from New York University, I happened to let slip the truth
that my wife had written my poems [laughter].
This was unusual candor, and it was partly untrue.
She wrote only the best ones.   Thank you, Frannie, again.
I'd like to thank my three great departed editors who published me
when I was not a household name, even in my own household [laughter].
Howard Moss of the New Yorker, George Hitchcock of Kayak,
and the extraordinary Harry Ford.
And I'd like to thank my present editor, the living one, Ann.
This could go on forever if I were to thank all the poets
who inspired me and encouraged me.
And I'd like to thank the ones in my own generation, especially,
who made writing in my life seem important.
I'm thinking of people like Galway Kennell, Adrienne Rich,
Kenneth Koch, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder,
John Ashbery, and the ones that I'm forgetting,
Creeley, Merwin, Justice, Hugo.
I think we were a significant generation, and hence I was part
of it, and I may be a part that survives.
And I'd like to thank my one great teacher, John Berryman,
and also my two terrible teachers, Yvor Winters
and Robert Lowell [laughter].   They all tried [laughter].
Make no mistake, I'm deeply honored to be a Poet Laureate
of the United States of America.   You notice how easily I say that?
I say it when I get on the subway [laughter].
I say it all the time, you know.
The other day a guy in a liquor store recognized me and it turned
out he was a poet, an unknown poet, and he gave me a bottle of wine.
It wasn't bad [laughter].
Okay, let me turn and read, you know, let me get kind of serious
and read some poems, which is why I'm here, of course.
Why not read something a little ferocious.
This is from my book, "Not This Pig."
It's called "Baby Villon," and there's a mention of a war here
and the violence of a war.
It is the Algerian Revolution, you could say,
the fight to free itself from France.
The poem grew out of losing track of part of my family who,
in order to survive, left Nimes, France, and wandered the continent
and we couldn't find them.   Years later, I did find them.
But I imagined, I tried to imagine what the son,
I knew these people had a son who would be about my own age,
and I had no idea who he was or what he was,
but I knew what he would look like, because he was part of my family.
I knew what his grandfather looked like, his father, as well.
Baby Villon, he's a prizefighter.   "Baby Villon."
"He tells me in Bangkok he's robbed because he's white;
in London because he's black; in Barcelona, Jew; in Paris, Arab,
everywhere and at all times, and he fights back.
He holds up seven thick little fingers
to show me he's rated seventh in the world, and there's no passion
in his voice, no anger in the flat brown eyes flecked with blood.
He asks me to tell all I can remember of my father, his uncle;
he talks of the war in North Africa and what came after,
the loss of his father, the loss of his brother;
the windows of the bakery smashed and the fresh bread dusted
with glass, the warm smell of rye
so strong he ate till his mouth with blood.
'Here they live, here they live and not die,' and he points
down at his black head ridged with black kinks of hair.
He touches my hair, tells me I should never disparage the stiff
bristles that guard the head of the fighter.
Sadly his fingers wander over my face
and he says how fair I am, how smooth.
We stand to end this first and last visit.
Stiff, 116 pounds, five feet two, no bigger than a girl,
he holds my shoulders, kisses my lips, his eyes still open.
My imaginary brother, my cousin,
myself made otherwise by all his pain."
Let's see if I can find something depressing.
You know, going, I was looking uncharacteristically
at this book, which I recommend.   It's my new selected poems.
If you buy it new, you get a nice cover on it.
I was looking, and one of the things
that struck me is how many poems there were
in which people were driving.
They were in cars, they were going some place
or not going some place, but they were in cars.
And I began to think, god, cars made such an impression on me.
I remember as a child, a lot of my memories of my father,
who died when I was very young, of driving with him.
He would take me with him, me and my twin brother.
We would go with my father just to be with him.
And, no doubt, he wanted company, as well.
"The Helmet."
It was written during the -- right near the end of the Korean War.
Excuse me, that's what it's about.
It wasn't written then, it was written later
in the early 60s or the end of the 50s.
"The Helmet."
"All the way on the road to Gary he could see where the sky shone just
out of reach and smell the rich smell of work as strong as money,
but when he got there the night was over.
People were going to work and back,
the sidewalks were lakes no one walked on,
the diners were saying time to eat so he stopped and talked
to a woman who'd been up late making helmets.
There are white hands the color of steel, they have put their lives
into steel, and if hands could lay
down their lives these hands would be helmets.
He and the woman did not lie down,
not because she would praise the steel helmet boarding a train
for no war, not because he would find the unjewelled crown
in a surplus store where hands were sold.
They did not lie down face to face because of the waste of being
so close, and they were too tired of being each other to try to be lovers
and because they had to sit up straight so they could eat."
That was a line I heard over and over as a child.
My mother had no idea how hard it was to eat her food.
I mean, we were trying, honest, we tried.
She worked full time.
She'd come home and, you know [laughter].
"To P.L., 1916 to 1937, A Soldier of the Republic."
P.L., the republic is the Spanish Republic, and he is a man who fought
in the Spanish Civil War and left his life there,
the older brother of a friend of mine.
"To PL, 1916 to 1937."
"Gray earth peeping through snow, you lay for three days with one side
of your face frozen to the ground.
They tied your cheek with the red and black scarf of the anarchists,
and bundled you in canvas and threw you away.
Before that an old country woman of the Aragon, spitting on her thumb,
rubbing it against her forefinger, stole your black Wellingtons,
the gray hunting socks, and the long slender knife you wore
in a little leather scabbard riding your right hip.
She honed it, ran her finger down the blade, and laughed,
though she had no meat to cut, blessing your tight fists
that had fallen side by side like frozen faces
on your hard belly that was becoming earth.
Years later she saw the two faces at table, and turned from the bread
and the steaming oily soup, turned to the darkness of the open door,
and opened her eyes to darkness, that they might be filled
with anything but those two faces squeezed in the blue
of snow and snow and snow.
She blessed your feet, still pink with hard yellow shields of skin
at heel and toe, and she laughed, scampering across the road
into the goat field and up the long hill, the boots bundled
in her skirts, and the gray hunting socks, and the knife.
For seven weeks she wore the boots stuffed with rags at toe and heel.
She thought she understood why you lay down to rest even in snow,
and gave them to a nephew, and the gray socks too.
The knife is still used, the black handle almost white,
the blade worn thin since there is meat to cut.
Without laughter she is gone 10 years now, and the on the road
to Huesca in spring there is no one to look
for you among the wild jonquils, the curling grasses at the road side,
and the blood red poppies, no one to look on the farthest tip
of wind breathing down from the mountains
and shaking the stunted pines you hid among."
That was in what book?
That was in "They Feed the Lion," I think, I think.
But it's nestled here with its uncles and brothers.
My oldest son once said to me, Dad,
how many poems would you say you have out there working for you?
And I heard Dylan Thomas once describe his poems
as sort of living creatures.
He said, he was giving a reading in New York and he said,
I send them out in envelopes, and sometimes checks come back.
And sometimes the poems come back with their tails between their legs.
And I really twigged to that.
I began to think of my poems as little creatures, and I realized
that I was kind of an entrepreneur.
These little poems were working for me out in the world.
I had never thought of myself as an entrepreneur.
"A Late Answer."
This takes place on a little island off the coast
of Holland called Texel, T-E-X-E-L, which was loaned to us,
not the island but a cottage on the island, by a marvelous man
who is now gone, Oliver [inaudible].   He was just a terrific guy.
And we went out there, and it was an unusual place,
because on the sea side facing the North Sea, that side, it was windy
and almost violent, the wind tearing in, and on the other side,
the land side, which faced Holland, it was peaceful and just lovely,
and the contrast was beautiful.   "A Late Answer."
"Beyond that stand of firs was a small clearing where the woods ran
out of breath or the winds beat them back.
No one was born there and no one would be,
but you could bury a lonely man there
or an animal you didn't want out for flies to eat.
As we passed under the trees you were cold and took my hand
and felt achiever pass through me, but you didn't let go.
When you spoke at last it was to ask after my thoughts,
but just then we broke into light so unexpected I had to close my eyes,
and saw the fire swimming there and had such a vision of the end
of my life, the trees turning to great flowers of flame
and the field ringed with sword-bearing angels.
I could say nothing, but held on to your hand and you to mine both
in the dream and in that bare place
where the North Sea winds lashed our faces with sudden spurts of rain.
Now, on the other side of the world years later,
I know the ant came here believing he would rule and he waits for wren
to fall, the grass waits blowing its breath into this morning
that rises darkly on wet winds.
Somewhere the sea saves its tears for the rising tide,
somewhere we'll leave the world weighing no more than when we came.
And the answer will be the same, your hand in mine, mine in yours,
and that clearing where the angels come toward us
without laughter, without tears."   [ Pause ]
I almost never read from this book.   I don't know why.
No, I kind of do know why.   It's a bit depressing.
Not that the poems are depressing, but how much worse I've gotten.
You think I'm kidding, but I'm not.
I mean, when I was young and energetic,
I mean 60 years old -- I just had more fire.
Now I have to be savvy and shrewd and sly,
and I want to be the other guy.   But I had that.
This is called "Let Me Begin Again."   [ Pause ]
There is a line in Whitman.
I wish I'd come across it what I was 60.
But I'm glad I came across an eventually.
It goes like -- it's from "Song of Myself."
"There is that lot of me and all so luscious," and when I read that,
I must have been 23 or '4.   I said, I wonder if that's true,
because I had never assumed anything like that.
And I thought, well, Whitman is a hell of a poet, the greatest poet,
I think, who ever lived in North America.
And as the years passed, I began almost to believe it.
And it's probably part of the inspiration for this poem.
"Let Me Begin Again."
"Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught
in the night winds sweeping out to sea.
Let me begin this time knowing the world is saltwater and dark clouds,
the world is grinding and sighing all night,
and dawn comes slowly and changes nothing.
Let me go back to land after a lifetime of going nowhere.
This time lodged in the feathers of some scavenging gull while
above the black ship that docks
and broods upon the oily waters of your harbor.
This leaking freighter has brought a hold full of hayforks from Spain,
great jeroboams of dark Algerian wine, and quill pens
that can't write English.
The sailors have stumbled off toward the bars or the bright houses.
The captain closes his log and falls asleep.
1/10/28. Tonight I shall enter my life after being at sea for ages,
quietly, in a hospital named for an automobile.
The one child of millions of children who has flown alone
by the stars above the black wastes of moonless waters
that stretched forever, who has turned golden
in the full sun of a new day.
A tiny wise child who this time will love his life
because it is like no other."   [ Pause ]
I don't want to run over.   That is a no-no.
When I was about 14 I met a man,
and I had no idea how powerful an influence he would have on me.
I worked for a dry cleaning outfit in Detroit; I was 13 or 14, yeah.
And I delivered.   It was during World War II.
This man was a Spaniard who had suffered in Spain;
he had been imprisoned and tortured.
And this little cleaners and dryers was run by two Italian tailors
who loved opera and looked down on him.
And there was another, there was another tailor there
who was a Communist, and he had named his two sons Lenin and Stalin.
And this guy, this guy Cipriano, and he would,
and for a while they would argue, because Cipriano was an anarchist
from the, the great, a member of the great anarchist trade union,
the National Confederation of Workers in Barcelona.
And after a while, Cipriano just gave up talking to this guy.
"To Cipriano, in the Wind."
"Where did your words go, Cipriano, spoken to me 38 years ago
in the back of Peerless Cleaners,
where raised on a little wooden platform you bowed
to the hissing press and under the glaring bulb the scars
across your shoulders -- 'a gift of my country,
you said -- gleamed like old wood.
'Dignidad,' you said into my boy's wide eyes, 'without is no riches.'
And Ferrente, the dapper Sicilian coatmaker, laughed.
What could a pants presser know of dignity?
That was the winter of '41, it would take my brother off to war,
where you had come from, it would bring great snowfalls graying
in the streets, and the news of death racing
through the halls of my school.   I was growing.
Soon I would be your height and you'd tell me eye to eye,
'Some day the world is ours, some day you will see.'
And your eyes burned in your fine white face
until I thought you would burn.
That was the winter of '41, Bataan would fall to the Japanese
and Sam Baghosian would make the long march with bayonet wounds
in both legs, and somehow in spite of burning acids splashed
across his chest and the acids
of his own anger rising toward his heart, he would return to us
and eat the stale bread of victory.
Cipriano, do you remember what followed the worst snow?
It rained all night, and in the dawn, the streets gleamed,
and within a week, wild flocks leaped in the open fields.
I told you our word for it, 'spring,' and you said, 'Spring,
spring, it always come after.'
Soon the Germans rolled east into Russia and my cousins died.
I walked alone in the warm spring winds
of evening and said, 'Dignity.'
I said your words, Cipriano, into the winds.
I said, 'Some day this will all be ours.'
Come back, Cipriano Mera, step out of the wind and dressed in the robe
of your pain, tell me again that this world will be ours.
Enter my dreams or my life, Cipriano,
come back out of the wind."   He was a great teacher.
I mean, I said my one great teacher, Berryman,
but I meant as a poetry teacher.   [ Pause ]
This is called "An Ordinary Morning," and it's kind of an answer
to a poem by Wallace Stevens, "An Extraordinary Evening in New Haven."
And originally it was called "An Ordinary Morning Far
from New Haven," but that title seemed a little mannered,
even for the New Yorker [laughter].   "An Ordinary Morning."
"A man is singing on the bus coming in from Toledo.
His voice floats over the heads that bow and sway with each turn,
jolt, and sudden slowing.
A hoarse, quiet voice, it tells of love that is true,
of love that endures a whole weekend.
The driver answers in a tenor frayed from cigarettes, coffee,
and original curses thrown down from his seat of command.
He answers that he has time on his hands and it's heavy.
O heavy hangs the head, he improvises, and the man back
in the very last row bouncing now on the cobbles as we bump
down the boulevard, affirms that it is hanging,
yes, and that it is heavy.   This is what I waken to.
One by one by near neighbors open their watering eyes
and close their mouths to accept this bright, sung conversation
on the theme of their morning.
The sun enters from a cloud and shatters the wide windshield
into seventeen distinct shades of yellow and fire.
The brakes gasp and take hold, and we are the living,
newly arrived in Detroit, city of dreams,
each on his own black throne."
Years ago, I was invited to write a paper on prosody for an anthology.
If you look in the dictionary,
some old dictionaries say prosody is the science
of the movement of poetry.   Of course it's not a science.
It's a bunch of foolish and sometimes intelligent opinions,
none of which will help you figure
out why poems are shaped the way they are.
And I didn't want to write a paper.
So I wrote this poem, and naturally it was rejected [laughter].
In a way, I used to write a lot of slender poems, three-beat lines,
some syllabic, some traditional meters, some free verse.
They were like, they'd go down the page.
I got the idea first from W.B. Yeats in his great, great "Easter,
1916" poem, which is one of my favorite poems.
And also from William Carlos Williams.
I tried to combine their, the way they handled that line.
And also, this was during the years
that Howard Moss was the poetry editor of the New Yorker.
Well the New Yorker pays by the line.
[ Laughter ]
And I think that might have influenced the development
of that line.   "Theory of Prosody."
"When Nelly, my old pussycat, was still in her prime,
she would sit behind me as I wrote.
And when the line got too long, she'd reach one sudden black foreleg
down and paw at the moving hand, the offensive one.
The first time she drew blood, I learned it was poetic
to end the line anywhere to keep her quiet.
After all, many mornings,
she got into the chair long before I was even up.
Those nights I couldn't sleep she'd come and sit in my lap to calm me,
so I figured I owed her the short cat line.
She's dead now, almost nine years, and before that,
there was one during which she faked attention and I faked obedience.
Isn't that what it's about --
pretending there's an alert cat who leaves nothing to chance."
Good-bye Nelly [applause].   Thank you.
[ Pause ]
For some reason, I've been identified as the poet of work,
but as you now know, I don't even write my own poems.
But if I did, they would sound like this.
Let me read, "What Work Is."   Thank you.
Ford Highland Park was once the second largest assembly plant
for the Ford Motorcar Company.
Highland Park is a little city within the confines of Detroit.
There's another one called Hamtramck.
They're separate little corrupt provinces.
It's now a warehouse.   I saw a photograph of it recently.
It still exists, whereas the Packard plant is just gone,
crushed, caved in.
I was in Detroit last week to celebrate the publication
of a book called "Detroit Disassembled," photographs
by Andrew Moore, marvelous photographs, and he has a picture
of what Ford Highland Park looks like now.
"We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park.
For work. You know what work is --
if you're old enough to read this you know what work is,
although you may not do it.   Forget you.
This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair,
blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead
of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch,
the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal
to give into rain to the hours wasted waiting, to the knowledge
that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, 'No,
we're not hiring today,' for any reason he wants.
You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love
flooding you for your brother, who's not beside you or behind or ahead
because he's home trying to sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner,
the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him you loved him,
held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek?
You've never done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb, not because you're jealous
or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is."
[ Applause ]
I was very fortunate to grow up in a house with a lot
of music, and a lot of books, too.   Both my parents were avid readers,
and so there were these incredible riches that were there.
My mother liked classical romantic music.
In fact, she liked Wagner.
And you know, as young people will do, you know,
you can't allow yourself to like what your parents like,
even if it's you, you know what I mean.
You think their taste is terrible, you know.
Well, Detroit at that time was the home of bebop, you know.
I went to college with some fantastic musicians
like Pepper Adams and Tommy Flanagan and who the hell else,
Kenny Burrell, and every summer, Milt Jackson would come back home,
and then there were the Jones boys, Thad and Elvin and Hank.
I mean, it was a very rich compost of music, it was an exciting place.
And I turned my mother onto jazz.
And lo and behold, she loved it, just loved it.
This one was written getting near the end of her life.
She lived in Los Angeles and I went to visit her often.
"Soloing."
"My mother tells me she dreamed of John Coltrane,
a young Trane playing his music with such joy and contained energy
and rage she could not hold back her tears.
And sitting awake now, her hands crossing in her lap,
the tears start in her blind eyes.
The TV set behind her is gray, expressionless.
It is late, the neighbors quiet,
even the city -- Los Angeles -- quiet.
I have driven for hours down 99
over the Grapevine into heaven to be here.
I place my left hand on her shoulder and she smiles.
What a world, a mother and son finding solace in California just
where we were told it would be, among the palm trees
and all-night supermarkets pushing orange back-lighted oranges
at 2:00 a.m. 'He was alone,' she says,
and does not say just as I am, 'soloing.'
What a world, a great man half her age comes to my mother in sleep
to give her the gift of song, which -- shaking the tears away --
she passes on to me, for now I can hear the music of the world
in the silence and that word: soloing.
What a world -- when I arrived the great bowl of mountains was hidden
in a cloud of exhaust, the sea spread out like a carpet of oil,
the roses I had brought from Fresno browned on the seat beside me,
and I could have turned back and lost the music."
[ Pause ]   It is, oh.
[ Pause ]
When I was looking, I'm going to try to find the poem I never read.
When I was back in Detroit last week, I saw my brother, of course,
and we were talking about our education.
And he said to me, do you remember Miss Hardman?
And she was our seventh grade English teacher.
And I said, of course I remember Miss Hardman.
We both loved her.
And he said, Yes, we did, wasn't she amazing?
She was an amazing woman.
And he knew what had become of her, because he stayed in Detroit.
She joined the Army and served in World War II.
She became a captain in what were called the WACs.
This is about being a Midwesterner in the era in which I was
and still am a Midwesterner.   "The Escape."
"To come to life in Detroit is to be manufactured
without the power of speech.
You clasp hands, as I did, with a brother and step
by step begin the slow descent into hell or Hamtramck and arrive,
designed, numbered, tagged.   It was the year Hoover took office.
Since then, I've been recycled seven times and escaped myself twice.
The second time I ran my hand down the body next to me
and felt my calloused hand touching me.
She and I hushed in a room I rented for $12 a month down the street
from the shabby little zoo.   How late I came to love.
Twenty-six years old and for the first time I became a woman,
a singular woman who loved me more than I loved myself.
What had I been?   What do you think?
Isn't it obvious I was a child.
And then I discovered Luckies, and then I suppose I created lies,
bad teeth and so much meat, bone, and hair,
a character in the shape of a man.
Then I registered for the draft and it was official.
Case closed, 1A, classified to die before I came
of age unless Hiroshima and Nagasaki burned.
They did. And I celebrated by drinking myself
into a stupor that lasted eight years.
The first time I escaped, I had gone out after dinner
and the dishes were done to be alone.
In the dark I found the tree, a copper beach,
and climbed into the crotch and leaned back against a heavy branch
and let the stars pass slowly above.
At first, cars groaned, one at a time, on the outer drive.
Then they did not.
Besides the wind stirring the hard, black leaves, it was only the roar
of my mind touching itself carefully with rain,
the first few drops filling my eyes.
That day's rain falling hours later from the leaves above, wind shaken,
and then the odor of earth rising like the breath
of a strange god I could love.
Can you imagine inhaling God at age 14
with lungs still untainted by cigarettes.
Little wonder I fell out of the tree and sprawled face down, unhurt,
my fingers spread wide as though to take handfuls
of last year's brittle leaves into my mouth.
Hours later I rose in the shape of a boy named Phil, but now myself.
I'm an American.
Even before I was 14, I knew I would have to create myself.
My beautiful literature teacher, Miss Hardman, who wore gloves
on summer days, who had a secret love
for me she could barely contain, had whispered this one day as we passed
in the hall, and she fought to still the urge to take my head
in her ungloved hands and press my soul into her breasts.
If she had not nursed that unacted desire,
I might have discovered love before I was ready and lost it,
never to awaken in a rented room 13 years later transformed
into an angel, gifted with both sexes and no wings.
Because we were Midwestern, someone always had to pay.
Johnny Mooradian [phonetic] had to be blown apart on Okinawa.
Silas Nance [phonetic] had
to despise himself before my eyes weeping and weeping
because a woman belittled him.
Jules Sprague [phonetic] had to run off to Peru
and disappear in the Andes.
My tiny French cousin had to walk by night from Nimes
to the hills freezing above Florence to survive the Nazis
and succumb to his own heart.
My lost uncle had to stab a man death behind a bar on First Avenue
and beg God to punish him.
Oh, Lord of life, how much you made them pay so I could love."
[ Applause ]   I think I'll close with this poem.
It's one my wife likes a lot, and so it's a gift to her.
It's about time I gave her a gift.
And to my sons, two of whom are here, God bless them.
How they weathered me, I do not know.
Can you imagine your father's at the dinner table and you say
to him, Dad, what's your name.
And you see his eyes are sort of looking at nothing and he's revising
and ruining some terrible poem, and you say, Dad,
pass the bread, and he just sits there.
What they put up with was so heroic, and I dragged them off
to Spain and they even liked it.   Two years there.
This is called, "My Father
with Cigarette 12 Years Before the Nazis Could Break his Heart."
And 1933 is 12 years before the revelation
of exactly how hideous and the Nazi regime was.
My father died in 1933.
So one good thing came of it; he never had to know what happened
to our family back in western Russia.
"My Father with Cigarette 12 years Before the Nazis Could Break
"I remember the room in which he held a kitchen match
and with his thumbnail commanded it to flame: a brown sofa,
two easy chairs, one covered with flowers,
a black piano no one ever played half covered
by a long fringed ornamental scarf Ray Estrada brought back
from Mexico in 1931.   How new the world is, you say.
In that room someone is speaking about money, asking why it matters,
and my father exhales the blue smoke and says a million dollars even
in large bills would be impossible.
He's telling me because, I see now, I'm the one who asked,
for I dream of money, always coins and bills that run through my hands,
money I find in the corners of unknown rooms
or in metal boxes I dig up in the backyard of flower beds.
My father rises now and goes to the closet.
It's as though someone were directing a play
and my father's part called for him to stand so that the audience,
which must be you, could see him in white shirt, dark trousers held
up by suspenders, a sign of the times, and conclude he is taller
than his son will ever be.
And as he dips into his jacket, you'll know his role calls for him
to exit by the front door, leaving something unfinished,
the closet light still on, the cigarette still burning dangerously,
a Yiddish paper folded to the right place so that a photograph
of Hindenburg in full military regalia swims up to you
out of all the details we lived.
I remember the way the match flared blue and yellow
in the deepening light of a cool afternoon in early September,
and the sound, part iron, part animal, part music,
as the air rushed toward it out of my mouth, and his intake of breath
through the Lucky Strike, and the smoke hanging
on after the door closed and the play ran out of acts and actors,
and the audience -- which must be you --
grew tired of these lives that finally come to nothing,
or no more than the furniture and the cotton drapes left open
so the darkening sky can seem to have the last word, with half a moon
and a showering of fake stars
to say what the stars always say about the ordinary.
Oh, you're still here, 60 years later, you wonder what became us,
why someone put it in a book,
and left the book open to a page no one reads.
Everything tells you he never came back,
though he did before he didn't,
everything suggests it was the year Hitler came to power,
the year my grandmother learned to read English novels and fell in love
with 'David Copperfield' and 'Oliver Twist' which she read to me seated
on a stool beside my bed until I fell asleep.
Everything tells you this is a preface to something important,
the Second World War, the news that leaked back from Poland
that the villages were gone.
The truth is -- if there is a truth -- I remember the room,
I remember the flame, the blue smoke, how bright
and slippery were the secret coins,
how David Copperfield doubted his own name,
how sweet the stars seemed, peeping and blinking, how close the moon,
how utterly silent the piano."   Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.   You were a wonderful audience.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.