[ Silence ] >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Silence ] >> Hello, everybody. Let me make sure that's on, yeah. Thanks for coming out. I'm Rob Casper. I'm the head of the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library of Congress and I would like to welcome to our second Literary Birthday's Event of the Spring, focused on poet and novelist, Robert Penn Warren. First, let me ask you to do what I'm going to do with you which is to look at all your cell phones and electronic devices and to turn them off. [ Pause ] Our -- our sound equipment -- our sound equipment is especially sensitive to it and it's important [telephone chimes], there we go -- important that all -- that devices are off so we don't have any interference. Second, I'd like to let you know that this event is being recorded for future webcast and by participating, you give us permission for future use in our recording. I'll tell you a little bit about the Poetry and Literature Center which is turning 75 this year. We are the home to the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, previously the Consultant in Poetry, which I'll get to in -- in a second and we put on literary readings, lectures, and panels of all sorts throughout the year. If you would like to find out more about events that we put on, literary events here at the Library of Congress, you can go to our -- check out our sign-up sheet outside in the foyer. We also have a list of our upcoming events including our May 1st event. We have a reading and a lecture on necessary utterance of poetry as a cultural force being led by our current Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey. It's the final event of her term as Laureate, so we would love to see you there. We are thrilled to honor Robert Penn Warren today on what would have been his l08th birthday. He was born in 1905. You can read more about him and about our two feature readers, Alan Cheuse and Maurice Manning, in our print program which would be on your chair. One thing I'd like to point out though is that for the first time in this two-year old series, we are featuring a fiction writer and a poet. This is fitting when you consider that our featured reader won the Pulitzer Prize in both genres. I am also thrilled to celebrate the only person to serve both as a consultant in poetry, he was the second consultant in poetry here at the Library and the first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. So in his dual roles, we're happy to have this event today. Let me describe the program to you. Our two readers will read in alphabetical order and -- and read their favorite poems and passages of Penn Warren's work as well as connected to their own. Following their readings and presentations, as -- as is part of this series, Mark Matavon [assumed spelling] of our Rare Books and Special Collections Division will say a few words about this terrific table stop -- table top display of Robert Penn Warren materials in the collection and talk about the invaluable work the division does to ensure that future generations can connect to exemplars of our culture like our featured author. So, please join me in welcoming Alan Cheuse and then Maurice Manning. [ Applause ] >> Good afternoon. One could do worse in Washington than gather together here to talk about these matters. We're in the middle of an intelligence sequester as a brainpower, I think. So it's good for us to apply ourselves to these wonderful words in fiction and verse of this extraordinary writer who -- of whom I had had some acquaintance. So I was living in Bennington, Vermont, teaching at Bennington College and I was there because an old teacher of mine from graduate school by the name of Francis Fergusson had said, "There's -- there's a job open at Bennington. You should apply for it. You'll love it, it's not a real college or university." [Audience laughter] He turned out to be right. And it also turned out that Francis played a pivotal role in Penn Warren's life and I only discovered this after I did a magazine piece on Penn Warren for the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine in the early 1980s. It turned out that when Warren returned from his Italian sojourn, he came to spend part of the summer in Bennington. And there he met Francis Fergusson who was in residence at the college that the good rich people at Bennington founded Bennington College so they would have good table talk during the cold winters [audience laughter]. And so Francis Fergusson was hired to found the Drama division. He had been born in -- Francis was born in New Mexico and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. At the last of the semester, he went to -- to Paris and never went back to Oxford. That's what happened to Joan Reese actually. She went to London and then went to Paris and then never went back to London. She was 16 at the time. Francis was a little bit older but he fell in love with -- with the city and with theater and he took an acting class with Richard Boleslawski who was a part of the Stanislavsky crowd and actually if you've seen the film of Les Mis, the Frederick March film of Les Mis which ranging far and wide here, I know, but it will all come back tomorrow. Boleslawski directed Frederick March in the -- I think it's 1938 version of Les Miserables which, I don't know what you think, but I lasted four minutes in the film [audience laughter] -- the current film of Les Miserables. Everyone sang [audience laughter], even the slaves. So Francis was in residence there and -- and Warren came through and they met and they were talking about their work and Warren said well, he had written this first play about an Italian dictator [audience chuckles] as in Mussolini and would Francis take a look at it. And so Francis read it and he said -- he had a -- had a wonderful way, pithy way but also kind of plain-spoken way saying these things. He said to Warren, he said, "I think this might do better as novel [audience laughter]." And Warren then thought about that and thought, well maybe a novel he could set in his native Louisiana with his native proto-fascist dictator in residence [audience laugher] and that's -- that's one of the reasons we got, "All the King's Men," because of that intense, critical conversation that he had with my old teacher, Francis Fergusson. One more note on Francis, he -- he once was a reader on a thesis from the Italian Department at Rutgers. He eventually came to Rutgers which is where I knew him and it was 600 pages on the Emblem of the Hawk in some obscure Italian [inaudible]. He passed the thesis and he said, "But perhaps we have everything that should be written about the Hawk [audience laughter] and this Italian poet from [inaudible]." And then I -- I met Warren when I was writing for the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. I was in Vermont and he was living in Vermont and so one summer in the late '70s, he agreed to sit still while I came over and talked with him and -- and his wife, Eleanor. And so I did this piece about him. I spent a lot of time over there. It was about an hour as the crow flies, or maybe it was an hour and a half by car on the eastern side of Vermont. And -- and then later, I was teaching at the University of the South at Sewanee for a term and brought the writing class I was teaching over to -- to Vanderbilt where he was giving a reading one night. And -- any Vanderbilt alums here? Then I'll speak freely [audience laughter] about Vanderbilt. And he gave this wonderful reading and -- and in the question and answer period, the first question was, "Mr. Warren, of course Vanderbilt is a great university, a lot greater than it was when you were here because [audience laughter], you know, we have this and this building and that building." And Warren [chuckles], he had this eye, a false eye because his brother threw a stone up in the air when they were fooling around on the lawn of their house in Guthrie, Kentucky, just north of the Tennessee border, when they were kids. And the stone came down and put his eye out which is why he never got to the naval academy which is why he had [inaudible]. In any case, so he'd answer questions -- he -- you know, it looked as though he was looking over here because of the -- the arrangement of his eyes but he was speaking to this kid. He said, "Well, son -- ," he had this -- have you ever heard him speak in his gravelly [background noise] -- I guess southern Kentucky accent or -- and he said, "Well, Vanderbilt was kind of nice when I was here. We -- it wasn't grand as this -- but you know, we had a room, we had a table and chairs. We had a very good instructor." And I think the university just needs a table and some chairs and a good instructor [audience laughter]. And I remember another -- another thing he said. One of the questions was, of course, the obligatory, "How do you write?" He said, "Well, I prepare." He said, "I prepare. In the summer, I wake up and I -- I swim in the creek," They had this little creek near his house. "And then -- and then I eat a hardy breakfast and I go to work. And in winter," he said, "In the winter, I'm too cold to swim so I lift weights and eat a hardy breakfast and then I'd go to work in this little shed sort of -- I had in the back." So he said, "Son," he said, "I think every writer needs [Audience laughter] So one morning after eating a hardy breakfast, he wrote this. Chapter One: Mason City. "To get there, you follow Highway 58 going northeast out of the city and it's a good highway and new -- or was new that day we went up it. If you look up the highway and it's straight for miles coming at you with the black line down the center coming at it and new black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires. And if you don't quit staring at that line and don't take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck, you'll hypnotize yourself and you'll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab and you'll try to jerk her back on. But you can't, because the slab is high like a curb and maybe you'll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts to dive but you won't make it, of course. Then a nigger chopping cotton a mile away, he'll look up and see the little column of black smoke standing up above the vitriolic, arsenical green of the cotton rows. And up against the violent metallic throbbing blue of the sky and he'll say, "Lawd God, it's another one done done hit." [Audience chuckle] And the next nigger down the road, he'll say, "Lawd God," and the first nigger will giggle and the hoe will lift again and the blade will flash in the sun like a heliograph. Then a few days later, the boys from the Highway Department will mark the spot of the little metal square on a metal rod stuck in the black dirt off the shoulder, the metal square painted white and on it in black, a skull and crossbones. Later on, love vine will climb up it out of the woods -- excuse me -- out of the weeds. But if you wake up in time and don't hook your wheel off the slab, you'll go whipping on in into the dazzle and now and then a car will come at you steady out of the dazzle and will pass you with a snatching sound as though God-Almighty had ripped a tin roof loose with His bare hands. Way off ahead of you, at the horizon where the cotton fields are blurred into the light, the slab will glitter and gleam like water, as though the road were flooded. You'll go whipping toward it but it will always -- always be ahead of you, that bright, flooded place, like a mirage. You'll go past the little white metal squares set on metal rods, with the skull and crossbones on them to mark the spot. For this is the country where the age of the internal combustion engine has come into its own, where every boy is Barney Oldfield, and the girls wear organdy and batiste and eyelet embroidery and no panties on account of the climate and have little -- smooth little faces to break your heart and when the wind of the car's speed lifts up their hair at the temples, you see the sweet little beads of perspiration nestling there. And they sit low in the seat with their little spines crooked and their bent knees high toward the dashboard and not too close together for the cool, if you could call it that, from the hood ventilator, where the smell of gasoline and burning brake bands and redeye is sweeter than myrrh, where the eight-cylinder jobs come roaring around the curves in the red hills and scatter the gravel like spray, and when they ever get down in the flat country and hit the new slab, God have mercy on the marine [audience chuckles]. On up Number 58 and the country breaks. The flat country and the big cotton fields are gone now, and the grove of live shacks way off yonder where the big house is and the whitewashed shacks, all just alike, set in a row by the cotton fields with the cotton growing up to the doorstep, where the pickaninny sits like a black Billilken and sucks its thumb and watches you go by. That's all left behind now, it's red hills now, not high, with blackberry bushes along the fence rows and blackjack clumps in the bottoms and now and then a place where the second-growth pines stand close together if they haven't burned over for sheep grass, and if they've burned over, there are the black stubs. The cotton patches cling to the hillsides and the gullies cut across the cotton patches. The corn blades hang stiff and are streaked with yellow. There were pine forests here a long time ago, but they're gone. The bastards got in here and set up the mills, and laid the narrow-gauge tracks and knocked together the company commissaries and paid a dollar a day and folks swarmed out of the brush for the dollar and folks come from God knows where, riding in wagons with a chest of drawers and a bedstead canted together in the wagon bed and five kids huddled down together and the old woman hunched on the wagon seat with a poke bonnet on her head and snuff on her gums and a young one hanging on her tit. The saws sang soprano and the clerk in the commissary passed out the black-strap molasses and the sow-belly and wrote in his big book, and the Yankee dollar and Confederate dumbness collaborated to heal the wounds of four years of fratricidal strife, and all was merry as a marriage bell until all of a sudden there weren't any more pine trees. They stripped the mills, the narrow-gauge tracks got covered with grass. Folks tore down the commissaries for kindling wood. There wasn't any more dollar a day. The big boys were gone, with diamond rings on their fingers and broadcloth on their backs. But a good many of the folks stayed right on and watched the gullies eat deeper into the red clay. And a good handful of those folks and their heirs and assigns stayed in Mason City, 4,000 of them, more or less." That's the road to Mason City and the opening of the novel [inaudible]. Just an extraordinary induction to use your poet's language to one of the great books of American culture, I think. And also as you hear that and if you've read Lie Down in Darkness and that opening, that train run -- that's where [inaudible] stole it, stole it right from here. The mention of that blackberry reminds me -- I'll just say this one more thing [inaudible] -- one of the most extraordinary initiation stories, "An English Blackberry." You all read it? Or many of you read it -- great, great story and inspirational for anybody or instructional for anybody who wants to try to write an initiation story of their own. And so it's an initiation story not just for civilians but also for writers. And so in closing, in the spirit of induction and initiation, I just want to read the opening of -- a very brief opening to [inaudible] my stories is coming out next spring, March, 2014, may we get there -- unless it's sequestered [audience laughter]. The entire month's sequestered. And it's -- so this is -- I just wrote this, I thought I was writing prose but this little magazine called Superstition Review said, "Published it as a prose poem." That's the only thing close to poetry I've ever published. This is called, "An Authentic Captain Marvel Ring, "Light silvery metal, a square box-like piece mounted on the top where it's centered over the knuckle. And in the center of the box, an opening. Peep inside, that is press it in the dark room to one eye while the other you keep closed tight and as soon as you become accustomed to the dark, you begin to see light swirling within the ring, halos and rings of glitter and pieces of light, particles of atoms -- of atoms growing smaller and smaller in the depths of the once tiny but now ever expanding space. A peek into another place, into a seemingly infinite galaxy of galaxies dancing spinning, sparkling, exploding now. Oh, and that flash of fire in the far distance -- but where? But how? How far away? A fingertip and an infinity and what if this could be real? And what if there were stars in all those flashing rings of light within? Stars with planets and planets with creatures living upon them? What if there were other human beings living there? What if -- what if you looked long enough and hard enough, squinted at this peephole all night long until you might see into the lake of stars and into the small galaxy with the yellow star and the green-blue planet resembling earth and on down through the blue-white atmosphere to the continent of North America? And in the east of that formation to the State of New Jersey and the town that lies at the confluence of squints waters, where the river meets the kill to form the bay? And a boy lies in the dark, his heart beating with excitement with the expectation of worlds to come while he Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Now, from New Jersey to Kentucky [audience laughter]. [ Noises ] >> Hello, I want to thank Rob and Caitlyn and their staff here for making this event possible. I told Rob before we started that Robert Penn Warren is a writer who has haunted my thoughts for a long time and I could spend a long time talking about that but I think the best thing is to read one of my favorite Robert Penn Warren poems. And this is from his later collection that came out in 1978 called, "Now and Then." I think Penn Warren is one of those rare poets who got better as he got older and for my personal purposes, the two poems I'm going to read are both reflections on his childhood in Kentucky. This is called, "Boy Wandering in Simms' Valley," and I think you'll hear some interesting overlaps between the passage from, "All the King's Men," that Alan read. "Through brush and love vine, well-blooded by blackberry thorn, long-dried past prime under summer's late molten light and past the last rockslide at ridge-top and stubborn, raw tangle of cedar, I clambered breath short and spit white from lung-depth. Then, down the lone valley, called Simms' Valley still where Simms, long back, had nursed a sick wife until; she died, then turned out his spindly stock to forage at will, and took down his 12-gauge and simply lay down by her side. No kin they had and nobody came just to jaw. It was two years before some straggling hunter sat down on the porch edge to rest, then started to prowl. He saw what he saw, saw no reason to linger, so high-tailed to town. A dirt farmer needs a good wife to keep a place trim so the place must have gone to wrack with his old lady sick. And when I came there, years later, old furrows were dim and dimmer in fields where grew maples and such, a span thick. So for years, the farm had contracted. Now, barn down and all the yard back to wilderness gone and only the house to mark human hope, but ready to fall. No buyer at tax-sale, it waited, forgotten and lonely. I stood in the bedroom upstairs in lowering sun and saw sheets hangs, spider web rotten and blankets the mass of what weather and leaves from the broken window had done not to mention the rats and thought what had there had come to pass. But lower was sinking the sun. I shook myself, flung a last glance around, then suddenly saw the old, enameled bed-pan, high on a shelf. I stood still again as the last sun fell on me and stood wondering what life is and love and what they may be. [ Applause ] >> That's what he was able to do when he was 74 [audience laughter]. There's another poem written in the same period of his life. It's a bit longer and I'm going to try to speed up my reading if you don't mind. This is called, "Red Tailed Hawk and Pyre of Youth." "Breath, clamber short face sun peeled, stones loose like untruth underfoot. I had just made the ridge crest and there opening like joy, the inapprehensible purity of afternoon flooded in silver, the sky. It was the hour of stainless silver just before the gold begins. Eyes strangely heavy like lead drew down to the 30-30 hung on my hand as on a crooked stick in growing wonder at what it might really be. It was as though I did not know its name nor mine nor yet had known that all is only all and part of all. No wind moved the silver light. No movement except for the center of the -- that convex perfection not yet a dot even nameless no color, merely a shadowy vortex of silver. Then, in widening circles, oh mirror, and suddenly I knew the name and saw as though seeing it come toward me unforgiving the hot blood of the air. Gold eyes unforgiving for they like God see all. There was no decision in the act. There was no choice in the act. The act impossible but possible. I screamed not knowing from what emotion as at that insane range I pressed the cool, snubbed trigger, saw the circle break. Heart leaping in joy passed definition in eyes, tears passed definition by rocky hill and valley already dark devoured the bloody body already to my bare flesh embraced, cuddled like babe to heart in my heart beating like love, thus homeward. But nobody there. So at last, I dared stare in the face. The lower beak drooping as though from thirst, eyes filmed. Like a secret I wrapped it in newspaper quickly and hid it deep in the ice chest, too late to start now. Up early next morning with my father's old razor laid out, the scissors, pliers, and needles, waxed thread, the burlap, and salt, the arsenic, and clay, steel rods, thin, and glass eyes gleaming yellow. Oh yes, I knew my business and at last, a red-tail, oh king of the air. And at that miraculous range, how my heart sang until all was ready, scald now, well scraped and with arsenic dried and all flesh joints and the cape like a carapace feathered in bronze and naturally anchored at beak and at bone joints and steel driven through to sustain wing and bone and the clay burlap body there within. It was molded as though for that moment to take to the air, though in God's truth, the chunk of poor wingless red meat, the model from which all was molded lay now forever earth-bound fit only for dog tooth, not sky. Year after year in my room on the tallest of bookshelves, regal, it perched on its bowel crotch to guard Blake and Lycidas, Augustine, Hardy, and Hamlet, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, and I knew that the yellow eyes unsleeping stared as I slept. Years passed like a dream and are a dream and time came when my mother was dead, father bankrupt, and whiskey hot in my throat while there for the last time, I lay and my heart throbbed, slow in the meaningless motion of life and with eyes closed, I knew that yellow eyes somewhere unblinking in vengeance stared. Or was it vengeance? What could I know? Could nature forgive like God? That night in the lumber room, late, I found him -- the hawk, feathers shabby, one wing bandy-banged, one foot gone sadly askew, one eye long gone and I reckoned I knew how it felt with one gone. And all relevant items I found there: my first book of Milton, The Hamlet, the yellow, leaf-dropping Rimbaud, and a book of poems friends and I had printed in college, not to mention the collection of sexual Japanese prints, strange sex of mechanical sexlessness. And so made a pyre for the hawk that, that though gasoline-doused and wing-dragging, awaited, with what looked like pride, the match. Flame flared, feathers first and I flinched then stood as the steel wire-warped rod to defend the shape designed godly for air. But it fell with the mass and I did not wait. What left to do but walk in the dark and no stars. Some dreams come true, some no but I've waked in the night to see high in the late and uncurdled silver of summer the pale vortex of pyre once again and you come and always the rifle swings up though with the weightlessness now of dream, the old 30-30 that knows how to bind us in air-blood, and earth-blood to gather in our commensurate fate whose name is a name beyond joy. And I pray that in some last dream or delusion, while hospital wheels creep beneath and the nurses' soles make their squeak, squeak like mice, I'll again see the first small silvery swirl spin outward and downward from sky [inaudible], to bring me the truth in blood marriage of earth and air and all will be as it was. And that paradox of unjoyful joyousness until the dazzling moment when I, a last time, must flinch from the regally feathered gasoline flare of youth's poor angry [inaudible] and ignorant pyre." [ Applause ] [ Noises ] >> In part of Alan's selection from, "All the King's Men," Warren says something about the mariner. That's -- I think, important for Coleridge who wrote, "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," is a poet Warren studied in-depth. In fact, his essay on, "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," remains one of the most important critical analysis of that poem. Late in, "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," a spirit says of the man who shot the albatross, "Penance he had hath done and penance more shall do." The poem is many things, one of which is Coleridge's study of sin, particularly a sin so willful and egregious it cannot wholly be absolved. This kind of original sin against other living things perhaps against creation itself is the sort of human gloom that Robert Penn Warren explored in his poetry and his fiction, I would say. Like Coleridge, Penn Warren sees poetry as a meeting place for the imagination, history, philosophy, and the inethible, a conjunction Warren usually observes in the natural world. Penn Warren's history is specific. It is American history and more specifically, the history of a three-county region in far southwestern Kentucky. And what is our great national sin according to Penn Warren? Slavery, a sin that has led to many others. Slavery is our national version of being conceived in sin. Penance we have done and it is likely, I believe, Penn Warren examined the sin of slavery and its unfolding consequences from the beginning. His first published book was a biography of the abolitionist, John Brown. Penn Warren thought more clearly about sin than he did about salvation, a dilemma I often share. Very briefly, I -- I just wanted to draw attention to a book-length poem he wrote in 19 -- published in 1953, "Brother to Dragons," which investigates in a verse drama an incident involving Thomas Jefferson's sister's sons who brutally murdered a slave in Western Kentucky in 1811, the same night as the New Madrid Earthquake. For years, around legend tied the two events together and it -- long story short -- the two brothers who killed the slave, Wilburn and Isham Lewis, Jefferson's nephews, devised a pact to shoot each other instead of going to trial where they would surely have been convicted. Well, one of them missed and took off down to New Orleans and was apparently killed in the War of 1812 in the Battle of New Orleans [audience laughter]. It's an event characteristically that Jefferson never spoke of, never acknowledged and Warren's investigation here is a kind of interrogation of Thomas Jefferson in the afterlife. It's a gorgeous amazing work of American poetry. The title, "Brother to Dragons," comes from a verse in the 30th Chapter of Job, Verse 29. At this point Job has lamented that all of the people who loved and -- and regarded him have abandoned him. And he says, "I am a brother to dragons and a companion for owls." My second book is called, "A Companion for Owls." This is just a strange coincidence. This is a book in the voice of Daniel Boone which I spent a long time laboring on and the title I got, "A Companion for Owls," comes from an interview from the 1780s conducted with Boone. I did not know in his interview, referring to himself as being "A Companion for Owls," that he was actually citing the verse from Job. After the book was published I was at a book fair type thing and the fellow sitting next to me said, "Oh, you got that title from Job." And so I -- I scratched my head and pretended innocence [audience chuckles] and rushed home afterward and -- and realized that -- that the two halves of that bible verse, "I am a brother to dragons and a companion for owls," really explained to me my understanding of American history, race in this country, and I think Thomas Jefferson and Daniel Boone are kind of two sides of the same coin that explain our various -- our two primary American impulses and identities. A strange bit of coincidence -- I think I'll read one poem from my new book which mentions Warren by name, if I can find it. This is called, "The Debt." "My father rode a horse to school. He was a scholar for a time at Tyner, Kentucky, Seat of Wisdom and Learning in those parts where he hung his letters right-wise on the line and summed or took away his numbers by the heat of a coal stove and the beam of window light flushed in from the yard where his horse stood tied to a rail. One room was where this happened in the Big Depression when nothing else was happening except some shucky beans and chickens, a midnight possum snare and now and then a coal field murder and ponies going blind from the dust and the dark time down in the mines. And he had to get his memories right which meant poetry by heart, by tap and rhyme, old-fashioned heartsick stuff like Annabelle Lee by Poe, easy to remember and recite, a woman the lover loved gone dead but still alive in memory risen to song. It was familiar ground for a boy whose ground was made of blood, blood of vengeance, blood of the lamb, blood kin, blood soaked land. Familiar land and dull, therefore, which is why my father decided he'd pull a funny one on that old Poe and so he dug up another woman, less elegant than Annabelle Lee, less ravishing and downright forward. And he remembered a verse for me, "Twas Friday night about a week ago, went up to my room and square in my chair, a-combing her hair sat a gal named Eula Loom [audience laughter]. Her teeth stuck out but the rest of her, no, for Eula was straight as the stick of a broom." What other 12-year old could have had such vision except my father [audience laughter] and yet how many times before that age, did I see him blind with rage and grief and hear him sing until his voice was there alone, remembering the room, the verse. I wasn't scared by any of that or hurt. He loved me. He gave me something to see and something to listen to, a music box with a horse inside and a man with a pistol running a woman around a tree to a raspy fiddle tune, winged and bucked and slowing down. It happens that I learned poetry myself in a one-room schoolhouse converted to a kind of a house, woodstove and water pump where I lived alone and glad with a dog named Banjo Jack for company on the ridges and by the bottom stream. We both liked wandering but if he got too far, I'd holler out, "Hey, Banjo Jack, Banjo Jim, come on back from where you been." Is it silly to holler out a rhyme for no one but a dog in the hillsides [audience laughter]. Perhaps, but that's the way it happened. At night, I'd listen to the wind and read from Keats or later, Warren, my kinsmen in a way, fellow Kentuckian, darker than me. We suffered in love this place and so I suffer in love it still and drag my father with me knowing it came from him from being here, the boy, the horse, the memory, and the heart, the sail-away ladies, sail-away tune, a skinny woman skipping away." Thank you. [ Applause ] [ Noises ] >> Good afternoon. My name is Mark Matavon and I'm from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division here at the Library. I'd like to thank the Poetry Center for inviting me to come here to -- to show off some of our holdings of Robert Penn Warren which we have in our division spread throughout several different collections. We have about 100 special collections. But for example, on this side of the table from our rare book collection, we have some things that are demonstrative of -- of Warren's early years at Vanderbilt University when he became involved with a group of faculty and students called, "The Fugitives," or, "The Fugitive Poets." And they published a booklet -- not a booklet but a serial called, "The Fugitive," and we have one of his earliest poems that he published in that particular serial. He and 11 other poets and philosophers later went on to form another group called, "The Agrarians," which was a very conservative group of writers and they advocated for the return to Agrarianism in the South and a rejection of industrialism and internationalism. And they published a manifesto entitled, "I'll Take my Stand," and he contributed an essay called, "The Briar Patch," in which he -- he advocated for segregation and -- and separate but equal status in the South. Moving on, we have from our Finkelstein Collection which is mainly first editions, modern first editions, a copy of, "All the King's Men," which I'll just hold up for a minute. And this is the -- the book that he won the Pulitzer Prize for in Literature. And from our co-collection which is mainly theatrical programs, we have a theater program from the Mount Vernon Players for 1949's stage production of, "All the King's Men." And, let's see, we also have first editions here of his, "Promises," and, "Now and Then," poems. Farther down, we have some small press publications, chat books of his poetry followed by some of our broad [inaudible]. One in particular is published by the Coffee House Press in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is a beautiful format for a poem and it was published at the -- to honor his installation as the first Poet Laureate here at the Library. So, please come up to the front of the room, have a look at these items. If there's anything that you'd like to see, I'd be happy to show it to you. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. [ Silence ]