>> Library of Congress in Washington DC.
[ Background noise ]
>> My name is Rob Casper, I'm the head of the Poetry
and Literature Center at the Library of Congress and I am pleased
to introduce our new Witter Bynner Fellows.
This marks the 16th year of the Fellowship
in which the library's Poet Laureate consultant
in poetry selects two poets to organize a reading in their hometown
and travel here to the Library of Congress to participate
in a reading and recording sessions.
Before I get started I'm going to have everybody do what I'm going
to do, which is to turn off your cell phones.
Hopefully you don't have to type in your little code like I do.
And I'll do that.
There we go.
All right.
The aim of these Fellowships is to encourage poets and poetry
and the work of the previous 18 Fellows,
among them MacArthur Genius Fellow Heather McHugh.
Pulitzer prize winner Claudia Emerson and academy
of American Poets Chancellor, Carl Phillips,
has provided an essential contribution to the Art.
Our two new Fellows, Sharon Dolin
and Shara McCallum are wonderful addition
to the Witter Bynner Fellowship.
We look forward to celebrating their work tonight
and supporting their future work through this honor.
We are also happy you'll get a chance to hear them read and I want
to let you know that you can buy their books
on the table right outside.
And also Sharon has one of her earlier books for sale
and you can buy it from her directly.
Our 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, Natasha Trethewey is here
to introduce both Fellows.
Natasha's laureateship has electrified the district
and the country and the Library has gained immeasurably
from her historic spring residency which started this January.
In the past four months when she is not crisscrossing the nation reading
to groups of all sizes, and I'm not kidding, often I talk to her
and find out that she's going to two or three
or four places in a given week.
Natasha has been meeting with the general public during her Library
office hours up in the Poetry and Literature Center office
in the attic of the Jefferson building.
I would like to thank Natasha, there she is, for her great commitment
to the position and to the institution
which includes her selection of these Fellows
and her tireless championing of poets and poetry.
I would also like to welcome Steve Swartz the Executive Director
of the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry.
Mr. Bynner, the namesake
of the foundation was himself an influential early 20th century poet
and translator and I know he would have been proud of this Fellowship
and the work it has done for so long for so many poets.
Thank you Steve for your commitment and for your support.
Finally I would like to take this opportunity to talk a little bit
about the poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress.
We are the home to the Poet Laureate Consultant and Poetry
and have been for the past 75 years.
And now I would like to welcome Steve Swartz to the stage.
Steve. Applause.
>> Thank you all so much.
Well, I'm here tonight with a heart full of gratitude.
I'm grateful to so many for the fact
that this Witter Bynner Fellowship has carried on for 16 years.
First of all to the poets, Harold Witter Bynner
without whose generosity and vision there would be no Witter Bynner
Fellowships in poetry.
I'm also very grateful to the board of directors
of the Witter Bynner Foundation for believing that this idea might work.
That a small foundation in Santa Fe New Mexico might have something
to offer the Library of Congress and the Poet Laureate.
It's such a special thing to have a Poet Laureate in Washington.
For me it's an essential part of the balance in powers.
Laughter. Because without poetry what are we?
Who are we?
You can't be all mind and technology.
We need the soul of humanity to keep us on track.
I'm so happy to be at the Library of Congress.
There's something about being in the proximity of 35 million books
and 838 miles of bookshelves that makes you feel comfortable.
Especially in a world that is so often the reality of the world
so often accompanied by such madness.
To be in a place like the Library, it warms your heart.
And so my beautiful wife Lisa and I are always so happy
to take this odyssey to Washington to be in this wonderful space.
It's hard for me to believe that in 1814 the British burned the Library
of Congress along with the Capital.
I can understand their wanting to burn the Capital.
Laughter. But I'm sure at the time the Library had at least one
or two complete works of Shakespeare.
And to burn that is probably comparable to burning the Koran.
But the persistence in poetry, the persistence of literature,
the library is a testament to both.
I don't know a lot about the Witter Bynner Fellowship recipients
this year.
I may call them the ladyships.
I don't know a great deal about our Poet Laureate
but I know a little bit.
I tried to do some homework.
I know that our Poet Laureate,
Natasha Trethewey was invented by William Falkner.
I know that she believes in a certain ruthlessness
about her poetry and I think one has to be ruthless to be an artist
in this culture because there is so much, so many obstacles
against being an artist and expressing yourself artistically.
And speaking from your heart and your soul you have to be ruthless.
God bless you for it.
I know that Shara McCallum is a fan of Bob Marley.
And Sharon Dolin also and I am as well.
So we're in good company.
I know that Shara is still editing her first poem.
I heard her talk about it on YouTube.
But I'm here to tell you to stop
because I think it's perfect just the way it is.
I won't read it because she may read it this evening.
I know that Sharon is really -- she doesn't like having to wear glasses.
Laughter. And she has a touch of stage fright as a child but I say,
don't worry, we all wear glasses
and we're all scared to death to get onstage.
I'm just so pleased to be in a position to help other artists.
That means more to me than anything.
To be able to reach out to other artists
and to help them realize their dreams.
Enough said, thank you so much for being here tonight.
I can't think of anywhere else I'd rather be.
Applause
>> Thank you Steve.
That was wonderful and you know, you've got me thinking.
I don't know.
I'd like to think that perhaps Falkner couldn't even have fully
imagined me.
Laughter and applause.
Good evening you all.
It's my pleasure to introduce this year's recipients
of the Witter Bynner Fellowships in Poetry.
Sharon Dolin and Shara McCallum.
Poets whose work I admire deeply and who are deserving
of even wider recognition.
Of the music of poetry, T.S. Elliot wrote, "I would remind you first
that the music of poetry is not something which exists apart
from the meaning otherwise we could have poetry
of great musical beauty which made no sense.
The apparent exception show only a difference of degree.
There are poems in which we are moved but the music
and take the sense for granted.
Just as there are poems in which we attend to the sense and are moved
by the music without noticing it."
Reading the poems of Sharon Dolin I found myself doing just that.
Alternately attending to one or the other
but even more often being deeply moved by the music,
the sonic pleasures before all else.
Listen for example to these first few lines from "Regret."
"Here's another sin, you're sunk within, all net looking back
to where you might have been or what you could have done to keep you
from the muck you're stuck standing in."
Or these dazzling lines from her newest collection.
"You're my elbow bow, my oh boy of woe,
met by chance now we compose a contra-dance."
The driving rhythms, the pleasures of alliteration
and rhyme snagging the ear before or is it
at the same time the mind grasps the sense Dolin's arresting wit.
Throughout her collection, "Burn and dodge" the musicality
of language serves as the engine of thought.
The linguistic delights underscoring the meditation on some
of the big abstractions of human emotion.
Envy, desire, guilt, regret and shame, even schadenfreude.
What emerges is a billboard of the soul.
The poets yes, but upon that billboard too I read the text
of my own unarticulated self.
This is one of the great values of poetry.
How it shows us our selves through the intimate voice of another.
But it's only one of the many things I love about these poems.
It's easy to envy the innovative handling of form,
the echoes of tradition, the reinvention.
How Dolin shows us again and again the inextricable link
between sound and sense.
Consider for example, the long poem "Current Events."
Written in the aftermath of 9-11 in which she meditates on language,
parsing the meanings of ordinary words.
Who, what, when and how, the journalist tool kit,
to show the ultimate strangeness of things, the why of them.
She writes, "Because you're here to ask, because you're never late
for work except that day you were.
Because why is fi?rst, last, exhausting, inexhaustible."
Sharon Dolin's a poet who shows us what it means to truly revel
in language who knows its inexhaustible range.
Isn't English amazing she writes in another poem,
how we keep having to learn it?
The journey of learning the language to see it made new again
in the hands of this poet is shear delight.
Please join me in welcoming Sharon Dolin.
Applause.
>> I'm speechless and yet I have to speak.
What an honor it is to be here and to have been chosen
by Natasha Trethewey of all poets.
Thank you, thank you to the Witter Bynner foundation and thank you
to the Library of Congress to [inaudible] Casper and to C. Swartz
from the Witter Bynner Foundation.
I'm not only a Brooklyn native as was Witter Bynner
but he's spent some time in Berkley I found out, and got thrown
out for serving alcohol to students.
I haven't broken the law in that way.
I am going to mostly read from "Whirlwind"
because it is my newest book and I'm going to start
out with the opening poem which is called "Ode to nitrous oxide."
But I haven't served it up to anybody that I know of.
And it starts out with an epigraph from the New York Times.
I do have to put on these reading glasses which I hate.
Coleridge said that nitrous oxide, laughing gas,
provided the most unmingled pleasure he ever knew.
"Ode to nitrous oxide."
"Is it only the memory of being 10 and being driven to Manhattan
to see the dentist as the elevator man called him.
The one time I can recall being in a building with an elevator
that invokes you or is the pain I feared then
or the pain I flee from now?
Tooth pain, the whirring drill or the agonizing ache
of hearing my husband just having had a housewarming party
with another woman in another apartment?
The one I don't have the keys to.
Is it about laughing over the pain or about going to take you higher
as Sly said in the 1960's?
When I thought I was too young to smoke yet there I was,
snorting that sweet stuff up in the dentist's chair
on what must have been the Upper East Side.
This Brooklyn girl from East Flatbush and loving it.
It felt like soft rubber wrapping around my face,
around as the dentist drilled around and around, drilled
and wiggled his nose and whiskers like a human bunny rabbit.
Here I am now, 40 years later,
asking for it in another East Side building where my name is announced.
Asking to be put out of my pain.
To feel the numbness flower down my arms into my pelvis.
Isn't it funny how good numb can feel?
Is that the experience?
Or is it waking up after?
Lucid but now longer asking or caring where it's throbs or when
or why or because of whom."
My son is not here tonight but this poem has him in it.
I'm glad he's not here.
I don't think this poem needs any prolog.
"After my husband moved
out his things my son dropped the tiny sponge Buddha inside the
largest mason jar we had.
After filling it to the brim with water then locked down the lid.
Each day the Buddha, a sitting frog, battening on water,
grew inside his tank as I'm sure the boy wished his father would grow
inside his heart.
Our house a talisman to lure him back.
We never spoke of it.
He never wanted to speak of any of it.
After a week he emptied out the jar, set the distended Buddha,
size of a rubber ducky, color of runoff foam on a clear pond
on the sink's edge and forgot about it.
As the air slowly shriveled the figure.
First the head.
As the water weighed down its sodden robes
until it was the size of a desiccated thumb.
Hard as a stale eraser."
The next poem I want to read is called "Unpairing,
Proofreading my marriage."
And I was inspired by Paul Muldoon's poem Errata
and Charles Simic also has a poem called Errata.
This one is very different but it's the same form,
thinking about how one proofreads a marriage.
And the only words you might not know are ketubah
which is the Jewish marriage document and the Get
which is the religious divorce document.
"Unpairing, proofreading my marriage.
Change paired to despaired.
Cleaved to cleaved apart.
Seen to obscene.
Trust to rust.
Change honor to Your Honor.
Lover to vulurgh [assumed spelling] mattress to matres.
Under his thumb to sunder him numb.
Murder to mar her.
Husband to us band.
Weaver to deceiver.
We aver to we apar.
Change forever to for never.
For better or worse to far better divorce.
Change eternal bond to infernal fond.
Change adults are us to adulterous.
Change domestic bliss to oh what a mess is this.
What's mine is yours to what's yours is mine.
Change dependable to expendable.
Change loyal to lawyer.
Change nuclear family to nuke our family.
Terraferma to error former.
Change ketubah to get a Get.
Domesticity to duplicity.
Change fourth wife to forfeit wife.
Change his analyst to his anal tryst.
Change her pissed to herpes.
Change dirty laundry to tawdry.
His ethics to his antics.
Her ethics to heretics.
Love poems to woe zone.
Change woe zone to war zone.
Until death do us part to come, death do your art."
I've had people ask me why this book is called Whirlwind.
I thought it was an obvious reference to Job but maybe it's not.
And then this final section I actually quote Dylan,
"We were in a whirlwind, now we're in some better place."
I was in a whirlwind, now we're in some better place.
But so Whirlwind I was thinking of Job and I'm going to read this poem,
this is not about glasses, about sunglasses in the subway.
There are some narrative poems in this book which I felt
like I had gone away from but then one has a story to tell
and then you just feel the pressure of narrative.
And one hopes I've -- Dante talked about the refining fire
of art I hope I've transformed the narrative
and done something with the story.
But there was a story to tell.
This is "Sunglasses in the subway."
"I knew it was a very bad sign.
We had just come from the marriage counselor and what had he said?
What ice stormed my heart?
His declaring he'd lost all empathy for me,
his wife, this doctor of empathy.
Or was it the argument over reading.
How I wanted him to read with me in bed.
And his refusal.
So that now on the subway, he announced he would read.
How is it possible to use reading as a weapon?
A wounding shield.
The shutters slam down and there wasn't a peep hole of light.
I sat next to a Buddha of stone and wept
into the punishing fluorescence.
Put my dark glasses on to guard me
from the blinding shame and the gaze of others.
But it failed me then as our son's exuberant young teacher,
oblivious to pain, sitting across the aisle
with her husband, called out my name.
I had to come up from hell and say hello.
Couldn't she tell?
How was it possible, not the reading per se,
but the armoring as aggression.
As in the mission chair in his study
into which he would retreat each evening.
The book or newspaper more pressing than his son or wife.
The shutters of his eyes slanted down onto the lines of any novel.
Once when I confronted him about lunch
with his lover, he swore was a friend.
Refusing to cancel and have lunch with me.
That evening he scolded me.
Why are the worst things always true.
For having moved a single book in the living room and I raged at him
in front of our stunned son.
And what did he do?
He picked up the newspaper and read
as though untouched by the whirlwind.
As though I had become Job and he already my dead husband."
I was at McDowell and a poet there asked me, well what's your part
in all of this, like what was your part in this?
Don't play the victim.
So I do have a section in here when I try to take on or try to think
about what my part in all of this was.
You know, as opposed to the wife, you know, who was cheated upon etc.
And so this is called playing my part and I guess in a way I'd
like to dedicate, well this poem has my mother in and I'd
like to dedicate this poem to my mother and my father
who are no longer with me.
"Playing my part.
I let him go, I complied, adjusted, saw,
did not see his disappearing act of staying while leaving the body.
It felt so familiar.
My zombie mom, on stelazine, Thorazine,
to tamp her paranoia down, would be there, not there to make macaroni
and cheese, do the wash, help me with my Spanish.
I knew she was sick.
I knew she loved me though she lay in bed until noon.
Again in the afternoon.
Comatose with the New York Post.
Her arm bent at the elbow to cover her face.
This was what love could feel like.
Somnolent, absent.
Why be paranoid?
When he slept in the same pose sometimes cooked dinner,
did the wash.
Who knew a blunt face could hold so much hate.
The child in me saw his numbing out, going to be early, not as aversion,
but as a version of my mother's love.
And all I had to do, as when she'd be taken away, hospitalized,
shocked, was wait for his return.
Is there a Penelope inside every troubled wife?
Didn't my mom always come back?"
[ Background noise ]
This is a poem later in the book called "Desire in the lack."
You can tell I went to graduate school at Berkley in the 1980's,
in the late 1970's or the early 1980's
because all we read was [inaudible] Lanome,
we read all the French theorists.
We didn't really read literature, we didn't read poetry, I mean, really,
I spent an entire semester reading Delhi da [assumed spelling].
And so there is a little bit of the of the lanconian [assumed spelling],
you know, the lack desire, the lack.
But I was playing with it.
I'm really playing with language, but, you know, it's serious
and of course, you know, it's, in poetry it's never just play,
it can be very serious play.
So this poem is called "Desire and the Lack."
"When I lacked desire my love unlatched his key from me
and soon I lacked a lackey.
Deserted, unstirred,
to know [inaudible] once lacking desire grew for a sire.
Now desire what I lack.
And nearly lack luster, abandoned.
Conspire with abandon for the bandonion player.
Layer on of love and blandishments.
There is an ache in lack.
When I wake on my back, oh what I lack, a sharp ack.
What song more plaintiff than the lone key of me.
The moan key of monkey me to let go desire.
What ire is higher than to find a liar where I had once been desired.
Now deserted, de-sired.
My unplucked heart liar in the dawn wind ready
to be strummed into fire."
Natasha spoke so eloquently about "Burn and Dodge."
I want to read a few poems from Burn and Dodge and then close
with some things from, again, in Whirlwind.
So this is the burning was burning up in all these different vices.
You know, it's good to be neurotic and right.
I think it's hard to be a happy poet, I'm not being --
I've had moments of it but suffering, you know,
you can do something with it, you know?
You really can, you know, at least we make something beautiful
out of it.
You know, it's -- and there is something satisfying in that.
I don't look for the suffering, it just finds me.
So this is called "To Guilt."
I don't know about you but I think it's a common vice,
I think of it as a vice.
" To guilt.
Eighth deadly sin.
Half hidden dissembler, you resemble dwarf centipede hunching among dead
leaves and soil.
Or are you between envy who bites her nails
and sloth who can't be bothered?
You vanish when I'm hard at work, then gash me when I sit
to read a novel or even think of running
to the movies or out to buy a skirt.
Or else you're step-sister mother guilt, with her 82 legs barges
in on me here in the café when I think I've given you the slip.
She finds me slacking off for five minutes, not with my child,
but reading the paper about a new species
of centipede discovered in Central Park.
How else assuaged you but equate you, draw you in.
Among leaf litter at less than half an inch,
you are shorter than your name.
[Inaudible] with your poisonous fangs you will probably eat me
when I am nothing but body.
For now feed on this."
There's a bunch of this particular form in here called the Ghazal
which is a Persian and it was a cashmirie form that aga [inaudible]
who passed away but he brought
into American English and I love this form.
You will hear rhyme and a refrain
and it's the only poem I've ever written
in which I knew the last line of the poem and wrote towards it
because the poet signs their name at the end of the poem.
And I always have problems with my last name and how to spell it
and where it's from etc, etc. So I'm going to read this poem,
it's called "Ghazal without the man."
And when I said this line, somebody thought, oh,
it's the perfect last line to Ghazal and now I have to write towards it.
So Ghazal without the man.
"You started out gangly, wrangling without the man.
Now you can't remember angling without the man.
Winter of frozen cherries matted in his beard.
Spring buds in hair tangling without the man.
Go, drive a car, the weather wanders you.
Life's a zoo.
Stroke pangeling without the man.
Flux redux can't undo, no mournful piccolos.
Such stuff as we are philandering without the man?
In Berkley women loved women.
Men, themselves.
Hard to play it straight, gamboling without the man.
Books inscribed, kisses under sheets, lost things, landslide.
Oh, turn not morose, memories dangling without the man.
What if after all is bled and flung it won't add up?
Don't be so sure you can handle it without the man.
Sleepwalking roofs, you never were that sort.
Picked up the pieces mangling without the man.
Got floaters in the eyes, water on the knees, getting older,
still newfangling without the man.
Adrift yet moored.
Unfocused.
Is this how it will end?
You're name is spelled mandolin without the man."
Laughter. I'm going to read two more from here.
I'm going to read this is my favorite vice.
Indecision.
It's been with me the longest.
In fact, the whole ride down in the car
with my friend Sarah I was like, which one do I read?
This one? This one?
So you know, who has never experienced indecision?
And it can eat you alive as so many things can.
But okay, so this is "Entreaty to indecision.
Anxiety's flunky you do in your undoing her grunt work.
Heart flutterer, sleep depriver it is to you,
two headed turn coat I have offered up my life.
Dun colored pea hen why can't I oust you at last from the roost of me.
You know how to tempt me.
On the one hand with your lavender veils, on the other with sea green
so I'm a swivel headed spend thrift.
Or when two paths or men loom before me I stand there medus-ed quivering
from caffeine until one or both dries up or grows overgrown
with brush or it moves on and so I plod, plod, plod.
The one still left or else bereft.
Always leaning toward dreaming about the right one.
Can't you stop?
I've worshiped at your twin alters long enough.
Not to decide is to decide.
On my teenage wall, my postered boast to live by.
30 years later you're in my blood
and when you're anxious mistress wells up inside don't I know
by now what I have to do to be rid of you?
Or do I?" And I'm going to read one more that I'm going to dedicate
to Natasha, she mentioned it and also to Shara.
It's just such a pleasure to share the stage
and this honor with Shara as well.
And it's called "Passing" and it's about the time
when I lived in Brooklyn.
Different kinds of passing.
"Passing on the elevator down with her dad,
the blond baby girl careens out full kilter.
On another day she nimbles alongside her mom whose face wears a permanent
tan and freckles as she strolls beside her dark skinned mom
in a generational parade.
So I can't help marveling at the quick progress of lightening.
From grandmother to grandchild.
And wondering what will Ruby, for that's the little girl's name,
call herself when she goes to check the boxes all of us must fill.
And you probably don't think it's the same do you?
When I hesitate each time I check Caucasian, of European descent,
that I too am passing in hiding with my ski clipped off
so I sport an Irish surname.
With straight blond hair, blue-green eyes, snub nose.
That even the Rabbis have always believed I must be a convert.
In Brooklyn 50 years ago, 50 years after the Holocaust,
in my Italian working class neighborhood,
I never could bring myself to light a menorah in the window.
One Saturday morning when I descended three flights
from my walk-up in a spring skirt,
the worker who swept the walkway looked up.
Where are you going all dressed up?
What I tossed off, I'm no longer ashamed
to say was true and also a cover.
For a voice inside whispered, don't tell him you're going to synagogue.
Where it doesn't matter that Jews.
Ask yourself what you think are never quite white enough.
I'm going to meet someone I said, in passing."
And I'm going to close with a few poems at the end of the book
which are not about [inaudible].
This one is about metaphor really and it's also --
it has cicadas in it and the cicadas are returning after 17 years.
And it also has a line, it opens with a line
from Dante's Porticotorio, I mean obviously metaphor is quite old
as we know, it is one of the oldest known things,
it's the sign of genius according to Aristotle.
The thing you can't teach.
And so the title is from Dante.
"As ants in their dark company will touch.
So lustful souls embrace in friendship.
So the blue damsel fly alighting on my knee,
so the darkening wheel of the moon.
So the chipmunk's nervous chittering approach
and then scampering retreat.
Comparisons are endless.
But to what purpose?
If poetry is this world's impulse to find resemblance
in remembrance then what if you decide to open the page
as a breeze lifts your hair, scatters two ripe leaves,
plops a bullfrog with its one note banjo twang.
Sets the cicada's electric buzz when the sun is hot.
All these movements toward expressions of the self.
Yellow jackets spittle forming it's grey paper nest in the playground
where children, ignorant of the risk of being stung, climb and swing.
What if nothing resembles anything else?
What is beyond like?
Or as? Beyond the embrace of thing for thing.
Paradise? The grave?
Knots in the deck planks are weathered eyes that don't see
but mark a point of focus.
See, you can't stop comparing.
As children shouting from the other shore the longed for place of memory
so the souls calling out before they can be allowed to cross
out of the land of this and that.
And what are the darning needles marrying each other mid air
in a double-decker waltz but a contraction of words.
What I mistakenly heard as dining needles as a child.
As if love making were a feast."
And I'm going to close with two really short love poems.
In amorato which is -- which means in love, and you'll hear lots
of musical terms and this is a tree away
which is a 13th century French form.
I'd never written one before and it's fun.
I think I've written another one since.
And it's a triolet because there's a line that reoccurs three times
and another line that reoccurs twice and there's all this rhyme.
And I always think of myself as a visual poet so it's interesting
to think of myself, well, I guess one does everything.
And you'll hear lots of sounds from music and I think you'll know them.
Maybe the one word you won't know is mumchance
which is being served silent or tongue tied.
In Amorato a triolet.
"You're my oboe bow, my oh boy of woe.
Met by chance.
Now we compose a contra dance.
I'm your cello.
Duo, solo.
Please pluck me pizzicato.
My oboe bow, my oh boy no mo.
Crescendo, diminuendo, all my strings.
Obbligato, vibrato.
We met perchance.
Is this our contra dance?
My oh boy of woe no more.
Now my oboe bow with one glance mumchance no dalliance
in this romance."
And finally this one is so heavily indebted to Lorca,
I don't know what else to say.
His Romance Sonambulo where he talks
about Verde [Inaudible] Green, how I want you green.
The poem, in his case, goes on to be quite political.
Mine is really just a love poem and really just is modeled
after his first two stanzas.
"Gypsy Ballad" after Lorca.
"Blue, how you'll ride me blue.
Blue hair, blue mouth, hips on the bed.
Crickets on the screen.
With chest of night he sleeps on his arm.
Blue belly, flanks dark blue and his eyes mud gold.
Blue, how you'll ride me blue beneath the sweating cloud someone
is calling to him but he can't hear.
Blue, how I'll ride you blue.
Small beads of rain fly up with the fireflies.
The eyes of midnight are opening.
The almond tree sways in the blue wind with it's blue lobed fruit
and the cactus, guardian of his blue pain prickles his skin
in the damp wind.
But how will he come?
From which direction following which blue map?
Still he rests his head on his hand, his blue belly.
Flanks dark blue.
Hips on the bed."
Thank you so much.
Applause
>> Thank you Sharon, just lovely.
Born in Kingston Jamaica in 1972, Shara McCallum immigrated
to the United States in 1981 the day of Bob Marley's funeral.
An event marking for her both an end and a beginning.
In his memorial to Yates, W. H. Auden wrote,
"Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry."
Reading McCallum's finally wrote
"This Strange Land" I found it hard not to think of that notion,
that place, a native land becomes the crucible
in which a poet's sensibilities are formed.
From the impact of the historical moment into which the poet is born
to the crystallizing pressures of childhood and familial relations,
motherhood, daughterhood, wifehood, sisterhood.
McCallum weaves a collection at once timely and timeless in it's wisdom.
The collection begins with a poem called "Psalm for Kingston" A kind
of love letter to the city of her birth, long lines and a litany
of vivid imagery of the place and it's people in lively conversation
with Margaret Walker Alexander's For my People.
In McCallum's hands the meditation on the nature
of home yields a portrait of place where violence
and beauty still lie down together.
A place of which the poet must ask a crucial question.
"If I forget these," she writes, "who will I be?
Singing the Lord's song in this strange land.
The strange land of the poet's lyrical reckoning is the
exile's land.
Not only the place from which the immigrant travels
but also the world without.
To which even the child at birth is expelled.
Native land, motherland, so the poet asks,
what is separation's geography?
The mother's body is the country of our earliest memory.
The soil from which we are formed.
Our lives are an arc of flight, a way toward away."
Departures haunt this gorgeous collection
in which the ultimate bargain struck is to live in a place
where memory becomes a synonym for home.
The state of being in a kind of psychological as well
as literal exile becoming a fertile ground for the poet's examinations
as well as Steven's wrote, "From this, the poem springs.
That we live in a place that is not our own and much more, not ourselves
and hard it is, in spite of blazon days."
This strange land is undergirded by two powerful scaffoldings.
First a series of poems interwoven throughout titled "Dear History"
in which the poet questions the indifference of the past,
its permanence, how it is closed
to us unless we are willing to live in the present.
That is, to see the presence of the past in our daily lives, not simply,
for example, in her memory of Jamaica,
the violence of a 1981 election before her departure, but,
as she writes, "this election, this war."
Persona poems in the voice
of a character named Miss Sally provide another scaffolding.
Wise commentary, allegorian, idiom, in the lilting rhythms
of the poets other native tongue.
Reminding us of the edict to think wisely but expressed
in the language of the common people.
Shara McCallum is a poet of such music and grace.
She's able to show us again
and again beauty masking its own violence.
As in these lines from "The Waves.
"There are moments in a life when everything comes apart.
Is ripped so clean who you are is laid bare."
If, as she writes, "history is a room we cannot enter."
Shara McCallum gives us a way to know ourselves.
Our own geographies.
A shimmering view into the past, its terrible beauty
that belongs to all of us.
Please join me in welcoming Shara McCallum.
Applause
>> I have to echo Sharon on all counts.
I'm sort of speechless after that.
Thank you so much Natasha, not only for that introduction
but for the gift of this Fellowship.
Thank you as well to Steven Schwartz and all the fine work you do
for all poets and for poetry.
I just have to say one thing.
He is no relation to my husband, Steven Schwartz.
I thought about that, hmm.
I also want to thank Rob, where are you Rob?
And all the amazing work that you do.
And Kaitlin who was so gracious to lead us
through the pathways underneath the buildings when we got lost.
My brave Congress, the Witter Bynner Foundation,
everyone who made this possible and all of you who are here.
I can't look at many of you, as you know,
since I will start weeping if I do.
So many of you have shown up to surprise me
and I'm really, really grateful.
I'm going to thank you, also Natasha for so much of your own work
which has always inspired me and not least of which in this collection.
Natasha's work, for those of you
who have not been privileged sodium sulfide far to read it,
you must if you have not.
She seamlessly blends the personal and public histories that are,
for many of us, the great reckoning of our lives.
Trying to understand who we are in the moment in which we stand.
And I really want to thank you for that work, not just for this,
but for your own poetry which has been a guide
and an inspiration for me as well.
I'm going to start by reading "Psalm for Kingston" which I love
that you said it's a love letter as I've always thought of it.
It begins with an epigraph from the very famous Hebrew Psalm 137.
"If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem, city of [Inaudible]
of a nancy prevailing over mongoose, brother rat, puss and dog.
A nancy saved by his wits in the midst of chaos and against all odds.
Of bawdy big boy stories told by peacock-strutting boys.
Hush, hush, but loud enough to be heard by anyone passing by the yard.
City of market women at Halfway Tree with baskets atop their heads
or planted in front of their laps.
Squatting or standing with arms akimbo,
[inaudible] with one another, clucking their tongues,
calling in voices of pure sugar.
Condoodoo [assumed spelling] see the pretty bag I have for you.
Then kissing their teeth when you saunter off.
City of school children in uniforms playing dandy-shandy and brown girl
in the ring, tralalalala, eating bun and cheese and bulla and mangos,
juice sticky and running down their chins.
Bodies arced in laughter, mouths agape, heads thrown back.
City of old men with rheumy eyes, crouched in doorways on verandas.
Paring knives in hand.
Carving wood pipes or peeling sugar cane.
Of younger men pushing carts of roasted peanuts and oranges.
Calling out as they walk the streets and night draws near.
Of coconut venders with machetes in hand.
City where power cuts left everyone in sudden dark,
where the kerosene lamps blue flame wavered on kitchen walls.
Where empty bellies could not be filled.
Where no eggs, no milk, no beef today.
Echoed in shanty towns, around corners, down alleyways.
City where Marley sang, [Inaudible] give the power to a bald head.
While the bald heads reigned.
Where my parents chanted down Babylon, fire, burn, [inaudible].
Where they paid weekly dues saving for our passages back to Africa.
While in their beds my grandparents slept fitfully, dreaming of America.
City that lives under a long memoried sun.
Where the gunmen of my childhood are today's dons ruling neighborhoods
as fiefdoms.
Where violence and beauty still like down together.
City of my birth.
If I forget thee, who will I be?
Singing the Lord's song in this strange land."
As Natasha mentioned, there are several poems that alternate
and I'm mostly going to read from the first section of this book
when I read from this collection.
They alternate in three voices, the voice of the child looking back
as an adult, that's their history, persona of me.
There's the persona based very much on my maternal grandmother.
When we migrated my three younger sisters and I came with my --
with our maternal grandparents.
For a year my mother remained in Jamaica.
Two days after we came my father died and many of you in the audience
who know me know this story, but for those who don't,
when I was 20 I discovered that he had committed suicide
and that he had been a schizophrenic.
This was something in a Jamaican family just did not get discussed.
So those are the personal histories and those voices come in here.
That the voice of the child, the voice of my grandmother
who I re-imagine as Miss Sally.
She will tell you if she's here, "I never said those things."
So I take a lot of liberties.
And the voice of the poet, the lyric poet speaker.
"Dear history, believe me when I tell you I did not know her name
but remember the color of her dress.
Red. Like my own school uniform.
I did not know death could find a girl.
Walking home stick in hand, tracing circles in the dirt.
Singing as she went along.
I did not know death would find someone
for wearing the wrong color smock in the wrong part of town.
My parents spoke in hushed tones but I heard the story
of her body dragged from street to gully,
left sullied in semen and blood.
I heard the song she sang.
The one I wish I could sing now.
Truth is, I was that girl.
Truth is, I was never there."
Miss Sally on politics.
"The one eyed man in a blind eye country, but harm can do better
when no one want to see what going on.
Every time party man come round, him jumping up and down,
like a puppy, eager for please.
Him tell me, is not woman business, the selection.
It's not for me to understand.
Me tell you all the same what I know.
If you see a jackass don't you must ride it?"
Laughter. I will say, and Rob please don't kill me
for exposing my political allegiance, that poem was a heck
of a lot more fun to read when Bush was in office.
Laughter. Not his office, just the reading of the poem.
"The waves.
We walk into rooms that wait for us to answer them.
We walk into waves that threaten to drown us.
But they don't.
They fill us instead with salt, sand and their own light.
As a child from a small boat I watched my father swim away,
ignoring my mother's pleas.
Her voice sucked into the wind, my own no match
for the undertow or sharks I feared.
There are moments in a life when everything comes apart.
Is ripped so clean who you are is laid bare.
My father returned to us that day
but he was not the same man I had seen enter those waves."
Miss Sally on love.
I like always be able to see every part of a room.
We had this discussion at lunch today, my sister
and I have the same obsession that when we sit
in a restaurant we can never have our backs to people.
But it's true of a reading too.
So I'm trying very hard to see the right side here.
Miss Sally on love.
"In my time I was a girl who liked to spree.
The whole world would open for me.
If I shift my hips to strain the fabric of me skirt, just so, still,
I did learn my lesson where loves concern.
If snake bite you.
When you see even lizard crawling with him belly upon ground, you run.
Now the gal come to me said she fall in love with man
who have a plan for change.
But she don't notice him also carry gun.
And lord, how she not see?
Who, running the show?
And who keeping house, same way?"
That's definitely my grandmother's take on, not only politics
but revolutionary movements vis-à-vis gender .
This is the last year history poem in the first sequence of poems.
"Dear history."
I think everybody in here knows these figures but let me just stop
for a moment to mention Marcus Garvey.
A great 20th century black intellectual known in the US as well
but very historic for Jamaicans.
Not only because he was a Jamaican
but because he was largely responsible for the aspect
of Rastafarianism that believed in repatriation.
My parents were members of the 12 Tribes of Israel.
The same denomination essentially of Rasta's
to which Bob Marley was a member.
And so that's who those two first figures are, Marcus and Marley.
And Manley, I know you will know.
We have a man here through all coincidences one
of my best friend's dad who flew him with the Prime Minister
of Jamaica in the 1970's.
He came to power in 1972 when I was born
and declared Jamaica a socialist government.
"Dear history.
I could tell when my parents stopped believing.
Marcus, Marley, Manley.
Their gods deserted them leaving little to ring between their hands.
After a time revolution's light dims.
Ideals get exchanged for smaller needs.
Milk and bread, the crumbs of peace.
In the final days everyone tried to explain what had gone wrong.
Politicians said tourists would no longer come.
Mommy and Daddy said slavery was the root.
Granny said it was the youths killing each other,
running wild in the streets.
The night before she and Papa moved
to America I prayed in the dark of my room.
But feared my words could no longer spiral up to something beyond.
We will come back for you.
I promise.
They'd send.
When piece by piece my family fled,
we didn't see the bargain being struck to live in a place
where memory becomes a synonym for home."
And I had not planned to read the Ghazal talking
about indecision Sharon.
But I went back and forth on it and I thought, it's a great way
to honor Natasha because not only is she brilliant with history
but with the form and her dexterity in forms is amazing.
But now that I heard Sharon read hers I thought, okay,
I have to keep this going here, the twins.
Did you realize this is also our sweet 16 right?
Sweet sixteen, 16th year.
Yes. So we are Ladyships in our year sweet 16th.
Okay, this is "Ghazal.
Do we remember love before neglect?
For too long mother, I've returned to your neglect.
Dusk offers a fractured memory of light.
Darkening grass conceals its own tail of neglect.
Can you teach me to remember joy?
Your life is a coupling.
Remorse, neglect.
By dying my father may have been loved best.
Mother how are we still subject to his neglect?
Bluebirds and finches return to my yard each spring.
Abandoned nests reveal the science of neglect.
Nights in bed I've listened to my infant's cries.
Puncturing silence that refrain.
Neglect, neglect.
In Hebrew Shara means she sings.
What song can offer the antidote for neglect?"
And the second half of this book is very much concerned with motherhood
which is not something new for me as a topic to say the least.
But what's new is that I became a mother.
And so that dramatically shaped my looking
at this very interesting complex and vexed relationship
between mothers and daughters.
This is a longer poem in five parts.
I will not read all of them, I'm going to read three but I chose them
to read tonight, I rarely read long poems for readings
because my two daughters are here.
And I wanted to read the parts that were inspired by each of them.
And I will say this, when I was writing this book,
they will not remember this,
the only way that I got this book written was they were very small
and I started getting up at 4:00 and 4:30 in the morning.
And I would be working on these poems
and they would come padding downstairs
and then they'd say, what are you doing?
So I'd say I'm writing poems.
And they'd say, are you writing about me?
Laughter. And I'd say, in fact, I am.
And they would have me read them the sections.
So even though in the poem becomes one seamless child.
There's no differentiation, they each know
that one of these is for them.
"Dear Hours.
One, we are the body moving toward demise.
We are the soul remnant of another life.
And always rain tapping on a zinc roof is the sound
of fingers strumming flesh.
Always I return to the things of this world, tethered.
You who have come to me from something somewhere I cannot name.
You who have a voice that does not speak any language I know.
Yet unfurls bright wings, alighting in each corner of this house.
You who are mine and not mine.
Tell me the answers while there is time.
Three. Tired the toddler tiptoes on padded feet.
She pitter pats on feeted pads.
She whistles and warbles, she burbles and bubbles.
A slug on its trail of silver she slooches down the hall.
A spider dangling from its last thread,
she pauses at the staircase edge.
At 18 months what does she know of danger?
The possible fall."
I'll read just those.
And I will just say too, my husband aptly points it out,
that they were not about the children,
which was very interesting.
He said to me after I said I'm writing these poems
about the children.
He said, they're never about the children, they're always about you.
All your poems.
Laughter. So I'm going to pay you back by reading a poem about you
that is definitely for sure, about you.
I hope. It's called "The Shore."
"Then you turned from me in failing light.
Trees startling into sleep,
snow rearranging itself in slender branches.
In the blue air of winter at dusk I stood at the shore
in icy reeds watching you skate a path
across the pond I was sure would crack when you reached its center.
The clearing behind the house opens in memory.
Fear stopped me then as now.
Trying to be brave to get this right.
I am still the one at the water's edge watching the distance
between us grow wider.
Feeling the thread that binds us loosen.
What happens to love in such moments?
Even now as you sit in this morning's light
and I cannot trace the lines of your face I struggle to see you clearly.
Not the man I love, but the man who is finally simply himself."
And I'm going to read a couple of new poems and then I'll close
with one more by Miss Sally.
My very first Miss Sally poem.
I have to say, again, how special it is to read here,
partly too because I came here as a graduate student a lot for readings.
So it's really something at that time I would never
in five million years imagined I would read here.
So thank you again, Natasha and Rob.
Really. So I'm going to read just a couple of new poems
and then finish with Miss Sally.
This is a poem -- these are a series of poems I'm working on.
Because I just write the same poem again and again.
Series are an endlessly helpful source of comfort.
Because I also enjoy writing in persona voice.
This was a lot of fun.
I began writing these poems about this woman.
She's not really defined in any sense
but I've just named her the mad woman.
She's some aspects of many of the women we know.
And as I get older I find it's very delightful to find a way
to access this figure who is so angry a lot of the time.
It's amazing to me how she is so angry.
So this is her and then I allow her daughter to speak.
These are just some new things.
"The Mad Woman and Ash.
Yes, I start fires at will.
With the time I thought to put them out.
But blue tongued flames licked into my dreams until I woke ready
to strike that first match.
You can guess, of course, what comes next.
But have you considered destruction is kin to desire?
The ruined and ruinous require each other for breath.
As a blaze razes a field or reduces a city
to embers, I too deliver damage.
So whatever can be sifted from ash will smolder
with the knowledge of its own disaster.
The mad woman's daughter."
And like Natasha this woman comes from a place
that even Falkner could not have imagined.
"The Mad Woman's Daughter.
All my life I have been pursued by whispers.
What? Pick me?
So greedy it consumes its own mama.
I was born at the time of day between night and morning,
the hour of duppies and dream.
My mother's screams seemed the world I left and the one I entered.
Her spirit extinguished the instant mine lit.
Before language possessed me I knew my life would be marked
by her sorrow pressed into my skin.
By her laughter broken stones that fill my mouth.
Now when wind gathers at the edges
of dawn I listen for my mother's wail.
Rattling through the cane.
I listen to recall.
No one asks for the meal that leaves us hungry yet we eat."
And I have to leave you on a slightly happier note than that.
As the case might be, this was the first Miss Sally poem I ever wrote
and this one my grandmother does agree she said some
of these things when I was growing up.
So much of this is her.
Chiney man is a Jamaican word for Chinese.
So just that's probably self evident.
There's actually a lot of Jamaican in here
that won't gloss particularly well.
They don't make sense and so I hope
that through the context you will get this.
And she's not here but I want
to also dedicate this poem to my grandmother.
She is physically with us still.
I realize when you say that about grandmothers it might
sound otherwise.
But she could not be at this reading.
So this one is for her, always.
"Miss Sally's Wisdom.
Chiney man say you put purse upon ground.
You never have no money.
When you was not born yet and your mother was [inaudible] picnic
herself, I did clean people house to make ends meet.
And when I walk down the street and some woman stand
up on a veranda shouting holy per rubbish.
I just go on about my business, same way.
I never so much as miss a step when I hear her bellow.
[Inaudible] and look what that woman come to now.
Now to see the likes so, looking like you lost your last friend.
Believe me, I understand.
I know what it is to want and not have.
To dream and next thing you turn round and whoops,
your life done pass already before you even think it starts.
So listen good to your old granny.
Clutch your purse on your lap or tight, tight up against your chest.
But remember wanty wanty, no getty getty."
Laughter. Thank you.
Applause
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