>> Good evening to everyone.
Welcome to the Library
of Congress.
I'm Mark Sweeney, the principal
deputy librarian of congress,
and it's my pleasure
to welcome you here.
Tonight, I'm pleased to award
the 2018 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt
National Prize for Poetry to
Jorie Graham for her book Fast.
The Poetry Foundation
calls Graham "one
of the most celebrated poets
of the American post-war
generation."
In her over 40-year career, she
has received numerous honors,
including the aforementioned
MacArthur fellowship as well
as the Pulitzer Prize
for Poetry for The Dreams
of the Unified Field:
Selected Poems, 1974 to 1992
and the Wallace Stevens Award
from the American Academy --
from the Academy
of American Poets.
Graham was the first
American woman
to win the Ford Poetry Prize
for her 2012 collection Place.
She's also the first woman to
be named the Boylston Professor
of Oratory and Rhetoric
at Harvard University,
a position that was first held
by John Quincy Adams in 1806.
A chancellor for the Academy
of American Poets from 1997
to 2003, Graham was selected
to the American Academy
of Arts and Letters in 2009.
Beyond her honors,
Graham has proved
to be a singular
and enduring voice.
As Craig Teicher wrote in the
New York Times book review,
"Graham is to post-1980
poetry what Bob Dylan is
to the post-1960 rock.
She changed her art form, moved
it forward, and made it able
to absorb and express
more than it could before.
It permanently bears her mark."
Fast marks the first collection
since Graham's career-spanning
From the New World:
Poems 1976 to 2014.
All three of our
judges included Fast
in their preliminary shortlist
while reviewing submissions
for this year's Bobbitt
Prize, and one enthused
about the collection as
a new height for a poet
with 14 books to her name.
This shows not only Graham's
stature as a major voice,
admired by a range of
poets and poetry readers,
but also her commitment
to pushing the form.
Indeed, the judges' citation
for this year's prize reads,
"In Jorie Graham's Fast,
the year is 1490, 380, 1774,
10 B.C.E., and the title
describes the speed
at which time leaps
ahead and rewinds
in this mortality-haunted,
panic-inducing beauty
of a collection, as
intellectual as it is felt.
Graham's astonishing abstract
intelligence is tethered
in almost every line by
the sensory, by the music
of the language and wordplay
and by the material world
that makes the red sleep
mask a father cries out for
in his last days into a metaphor
for the human time storm we
inhabit, share, and grieve."
Please join me in welcoming
our prizewinner, Jorie Graham.
[ Applause ]
>> Well, I guess the bracelets
[laughter] make a lot of noise.
Thank you to the Bobbitt family.
That was quite a story -- it was
enough for the whole evening --
and thank you for that
beautiful introduction.
It's complicated,
all the emotions
that went into that story.
The one thing that
is also behind it
for a poet receiving it is
the fact that your family --
I believe your wife is
related to Lyndon Johnson,
and there's something about the
idea that someone who was able
to pass such extraordinary
legislation
that took our country forward
is also somehow behind a poet's
attempt to be, as
Shelley would say,
the secret legislators
of our reality.
So I like that.
I must say that there's so
many ghosts in your story --
Lloyd Cutler, a family friend.
The idea that George Bush was
the one who would insist on this
and Daniel Boorstin would
not is really revelatory
to me [laughter].
Messes with my reality
[laughter].
That's really -- in
a really great way
that one wants to
be messed with.
The story of the card catalog,
it reminds me of Emily Dickinson
and also makes me feel
that that's probably secretly
what card catalogs are always
for [laughter], a sort of a love
affair one is having with --
even, you know, we've
all searched for books
and gotten lost in libraries.
We're in this great library,
and one of the great things
about libraries is
the adjacencies,
the person that you fall in love
with or the author that you bump
into that you weren't
expecting to read that is there
and beckoning you in a library.
So in one of the great
libraries on planet Earth,
I'm very grateful
for this evening.
The -- I'm astonished that
they cared enough about poetry
to make such a fuss [laughter].
It's kind of fantastic.
In this day and age, they
wouldn't give a damn.
They really wouldn't.
I mean the fact that they
thought about Pound's situation
and that no, that's wasn't going
to -- you had to go to the House
and Senate and do all this.
It's magnificent.
[ Laughter ]
In most of the other
cultures, and that's the last
of my general remarks,
but, you know,
poets to this day are
executed, beheaded,
imprisoned for bringing
the news, and Pound was
in fact a fascist and a
collaborator at a certain point.
It's the mystery of art to
try to understand why a man
in a cage in Pisa with an
African-American soldier
secretly slipping
him pen and paper
so that he could write could
write The Pisan Cantos,
one of the great pieces of
American art, and yet he --
I've gone into the Library
of Congress and listened
on the microfiche to all
of those speeches he gave
supporting Mussolini,
and they're hair-raising.
I'm going to read a
few poems from Fast.
Pound said two wonderful things.
When one is accepting a
prize, I think it's good
to remember one of them.
Pound first of all said, "Poetry
is news that stays news,"
which is one of the great
and important remarks
that many poets live
by, and another thing
that Pound said was,
"It really matters
that great poems get written,
and it doesn't matter a
damn who writes them."
So I think it's always
important when an event
such as this is taking place.
I always use that to remind
myself of the kind of humility
that is necessary to
engage in something
which one hopes will
represent one's time
to a future generation.
This book is one of three
that I've written very much
with a future generation
of people,
of humans, of others in mind.
In general, this book is
directed -- is an attempt --
it's part of three books
that are an attempt
to imagine the future that
we are headed into in ways
that many scientists
ask us to do
and which is a very complicated
process, and I'm not sure
that any of us are
very successful at it.
When people describe
climate change,
especially climate scientists,
they're always asking poets
and artists to please use
their imaginations and put them
in service of helping
people imagine what is meant
by a world three degrees warmer.
All the science in the world
can't help one feel anything
other than baffled
by this proposition,
and the conceptual
intellect can't go there.
The rational, scientific
intellect can provide data,
but the human imagination as --
without the assistance
of art has a very
hard time going there,
and as we gather here,
people are gathered in Poland
yet again today, trying to --
from all over the world
in a UN conference trying
to understand how to understand
this, how to describe it,
how to feel it, how to believe
it, and how to act on it,
and obviously we
can't act on anything
that we don't believe in.
So I have written poems
that attempt to do that.
In this particular book, I was
working with an imagination
of other than human,
post-human, non-human presences.
The one thing that haunts me
in the climate change
world is the feeling
that we are not the only species
on the planet and attempting
to understand this planet
from a perspective that's
not particularly just ours.
It's hard to imagine when
we imagine the extinction,
the sixth extinction, that
when we imagine the things,
the creatures, the life
forms that are going extinct,
it's very hard for us
to understand how
lonely we would be
if we were the only
beings left in creation.
You know, we think if the bees
disappear, we won't be able
to pollinate the almond trees,
but what if their sound
disappears from our life?
What if we no longer
have that as part of,
you know, our consciousness?
What if the birds disappear
and, you know, we are alone?
What if we look out at
the oceans and as opposed
to imagining an incredible life
under there of creatures not
yet disturbed or even discovered
by us that all vanishes,
what happens to our sense
of what we belong to?
Because sometimes I think
we belong to creation,
but we think we're just busy in
life, and so part of the project
of this book was sort of to
try to understand what it's
like to feel that you're a
part of creation and what it's
like to try to understand
post-human voices.
I'm going to read one poem
which is an attempt to write
from a non-human perspective
or to find my way
into one, obviously.
It's an illusion, but it's
an operative illusion.
I'm going to try to read
another poem that's written
from the perspective of
artificial intelligence
or that includes a conversation
with artificial intelligence,
but there are poems in this
book that are written --
my father died during the
-- my writing of this book,
and there are poems in
which I try to engage
with his body right after
it disappeared from me
but it was still there.
What was that afterlife?
I tried to understand
a religious afterlife.
I tried to enter into
the consciousness
of a medium whom I contacted,
I have to admit, and she put me
in touch with my father.
A little bit too much of "The
Waste Land," in that, perhaps,
Madame Sosostris,
but at any rate,
I did write from the
perspective of the medium.
Also from the perspective of the
dog, the only one in the house
that knew my father was dying,
and the dog who somehow
intuited it.
Of course animals know these
other things that we don't know.
So, many kinds of post-human
and non-human perspectives.
In this case, two
from that book.
Sorry. I have to find them,
or the type is big enough.
This is probably the
most difficult poem
that I'll read this evening,
so I'll begin with it.
It's called "Deep
Water Trawling."
It was written when
Snowden was beginning
to make his revelations
about surveillance.
What I found incredibly
fascinating was how primitive it
all sounded, these coiled
cables under the sea between us
and the United Kingdom
and that something
so mechanical was
carrying all this data.
I had imagined it was going
to be much more mysterious,
and I also was very interested
in deep-water trawling,
which is a form of
fishing which --
you know, it's basically
gigantic machines
that trawl the bottom of the
ocean and take everything
up from it, and it's a very
destructive form of fishing.
So the ways in which the
bottom of the ocean comes
about in this poem interrelates
those two activities.
In the center part of
this poem, I attempt to --
I don't know what the
verb is, but to speak
from the perspective of
the ocean or the bottom
of the sea just to try
to feel my way into it.
Can a human do that?
Can the imagination go there?
If the imagination
can go there, we --
if we can feel, that we
can imagine, you know,
what our children and our
grandchildren will be facing,
we might act.
There was a 15-year-old in
Poland two days ago that stood
on the stage after
David Attenborough spoke
to the assembled governmental
envoys, and she said
to the assembled governments,
"You are acting like children,"
and it was phenomenal,
obviously.
Children can't save us
if we don't help them.
"Deep Water Trawling."
Can everybody hear me?
Now it really matters
[laughter].
The blades like irises turning
very fast to see you completely,
steel-blue, then red where the
cut occurs, the cut of you.
They don't want to know you.
They want to own you.
No, not own.
We all mean to live to the end.
Am I human?
We don't know that.
Just because I have this
way of transmitting --
call it voice -- a threat.
Communal, actually.
The pelagic midwater nets
like walls closing round us,
starting in the far distance,
where they just look to us
like distance, distance
coming closer.
Hear it eliminating background,
is all foreground, you in it,
the only ground,
not even punishment.
Trawling nets, by-catch,
poison, ghost fishing,
the coil of the listening at the
very bottom, the nets weighed
down with ballast
raking the bottom,
looking for nothing,
indiscriminate.
There is nothing in
particular you want.
You just want.
You just want to close the third
dimension, to get something
which is all, becomes all.
Once you are indiscriminate,
discards can reach
90% of the catch.
Am I the habitat
crushed and flattened?
Net of your listening
and my speaking.
We can no longer
tell them apart.
The atmosphere between
us turbid,
no place to hide,
no place to rest.
You need to rest.
There is nature.
It is the rest.
What is not hunting
is illustration.
Not regulated, are you?
Probing down to my greatest
depths, 2000 meters and more,
despite complete darkness that
surrounds me, despite my being
in my place under
strong pressure along
with all my hundreds
of species, detritus.
In extreme conditions, deepwater
fish grow very slowly, very,
so have long life expectancy,
late reproductive age,
are particularly
thus vulnerable.
It comes along the floor over
the underwater mountains,
scraping the steep slopes.
What is by-catch?
Hitting the wrong target,
the wrong size, not eaten,
for which there is no
market, banned, endangered,
such as birds, sometimes
just too much, no more space
on the boat, millions of tons
thrown back dead or wounded,
the scars on the seabed,
the mouth the size
of a football field,
and if there is no one,
there is still ghostfishing,
nets abandoned in the sea.
They continue through
the centuries
to catch mammals,
fish, shellfish.
We die of exhaustion
or suffocation.
The synthetic materials
last forever.
Ask us anything.
How deep is the sea?
You couldn't go down there.
Pressure would crush you.
Light disappears at 6000 feet.
Ask another question.
Can you hear me?
No. Who are you?
I am. Did you ever kill a fish?
I was once, but now I am human.
I have imagination.
I want to love.
I have self-interest.
Things are not me.
Do you have another question?
I am haunted, but by what?
Human supremacy.
The work of humiliation.
The pungency of the pesticide.
What else?
The hammer that comes down on
the head, knocks the eyes out.
I was very lucky.
The end of the world
had already occurred.
How long ago was that?
I don't know.
It's not a function
of knowledge.
It is in a special sense
that the world ends.
You have to keep living.
You have to make it
not become waiting.
Nothing is disturbingly visible.
Only the outside
continues, but it continues.
Your entity is fragile.
You are an object you own.
At least you were
given it to own.
You have to figure
out what ownership is.
You thought you knew.
You were wrong.
It was wrong.
There was wrongness in the mix.
It turns out you are
a first impression.
Years go by.
Imagine that.
And there is still a speaker.
There will always be a speaker.
In the hypoxic zones is
almost no more oxygen.
Then there is no
more oxygen for real.
Picture that, says the speaker.
Who are you?
Where are you?
Going down into the dead
zones, water not water.
The deeper you go, he
says, the scarier it gets,
because there's nothing there.
There are no fish,
no organisms alive.
No, no life, so it's just us.
Dead zones bigger than
the Sahara, he says.
The largest lifeless
spaces this side
of the moon, he says, she says.
Who is this speaking to me?
I am the upwelling.
I am the disappearing.
Hold on. Just a minute, please.
Hold on. There is
a call for you.
I'm going to read the
title poem, "Fast."
This one has bots in it.
Everybody knows what bots are.
When I wrote it, people didn't
know what bots were that well.
Today I found out that
the bots are also a form
of organic matter, but when I
wrote this, I was just thinking
of the Cleverbots, and I did a
lot of research into the kinds
of companionship mechanisms
that were being created
for people all over
society of all ages.
You'd be amazed how many people.
This is before that movie Her,
which I think popularized
the idea, but the idea
that transmission
between generations,
which is so important, and which
loneliness is made less lonely,
because people who comfort the
lonely are themselves made less
lonely, is being interfered
with by our ability
to create these artificial
relationships.
In the poem, the Oracle
at Delphi is -- makes
an appearance.
I think of the Oracle at
Delphi as the first aspect
of the first bot [laughter].
The Oracle at Delphi,
obviously the priestess
of Apollo breathing in the
fumes in the mountain at Delphi,
spewed out after sort of
hallucinatory encounters
with these fumes, strings
of syllables, not separated
into words, which were the
fortune or future-telling given
to the seekers who would come,
and obviously a very clever
institution, not unlike the one
in this town, because
the priestess
of Apollo would give the
same fortune to the Persians
and the Greeks, for
example, [laughter]
and they each would interpret it
their own way, so an early form
of congressional communication.
The poem run -- the
title runs into the poem,
and so will read the
title, which is "Fast,"
as the beginning of the poem.
Fast or starve.
Too much or not enough.
or nothing else.
Nothing else.
Too high, too fast, too
organized, too invisible.
"Will we survive?"
I ask the bot.
"No." To download bot, be swift.
You are too backward,
too despotic.
To load, greatly enlarge
the cycle of labor.
To load, abhor labor.
Move to the periphery of your
body, your city, your planet.
To load, degrade, immiserate,
be your own deep sleep.
To load, use your lips.
Use them to mouth your oath.
Chew it. Do the dirty thing.
Sing it, blown off
limb or syllable.
Lick it back on with your mouth.
Talk, talk.
Who is not terrified is
busy begging for water.
The rise is fast.
The drought comes fast.
Mediate, immediate, invent,
inspire, infiltrate, instill.
Here's the heart of the
day, the flower of time.
Talk, talk.
Disclaimer: Bot uses
a growing database
of all your conversations to
learn how to talk with you.
If some of you are also
bots, bot can't tell.
Disclaimer: You have
no secret memories.
Talking to Cleverbot may
provide companionship.
The active ingredient
is a question.
The active ingredient
is entirely natural.
Disclaimer: Protect your
opportunities, your information,
informants, whatever
you made of time.
You have nothing else to give.
Active ingredient:
Why are you shouting?
Why? Arctic wind uncontrollable,
fetus reporting for duty,
fold in the waiting
which recognizes you,
recognizes the code, the peddler
in the street everyone
is calling out.
Directive: Report for voice.
Ready yourself to
be buried in voice.
It neither ascends nor descends.
Inactive ingredient:
the monotone.
Some are talking now
about the pine tree.
One assesses its disadvantages.
They are discussing
it in many languages.
Next they move to
roots, branches, buds,
pseudo-whorls, candles.
Active ingredient: They run
for their lives, lungs and all.
They do not know what
to do with their will.
Disclaimer: All of your
minutes are being flung down.
They will never land.
You will not be understood.
The deleted world
spills out jittery
as a compass needle
with no north.
Active ingredient: the
imagination of north.
Active ingredient: north
spreading in all the directions.
Disclaimer: There is no
restriction to growth.
The canary singing in
your mind is in mine.
Remember, people
are less than kind.
As a result, the chatterbot
is often less than kind.
Still, you will find
yourself unwilling to stop.
Joan will use visual grammetry
to provide facial movements.
I'm not alone.
People come back
again and again.
We are less kind than we think.
There is no restriction to
the growth of our cruelty.
We will come to the edge of
understanding, like being hurled
down the stairs tied
to a keyboard.
We will go on, unwilling
to stop.
The longest real-world
conversation
with a bot lasted 11 hours,
continuous interaction.
This bodes well.
We are not alone.
We are looking to improve.
The priestess inhales the fumes.
They come from the
mountain, here and here.
Then she gives you
the machine-gun run
of syllables out of her mouth.
Quick. You must make
up your answer
as you made up your question.
Hummingbirds shriek.
"Bot is amazing," he says.
"I believe it knows the
secrets of the universe."
"He is more fun to speak
with than my actual
living friends," she says.
"Thank you.
This is the best thing since me.
I just found it yesterday.
I love it.
I want to marry it.
I got sad when I had to
think that the first person
who has ever understood me is
not even, it turns out, human,
because this is as
good as human gets.
He just gives it to me straight.
I am going to keep him forever.
I treated him like a
computer, but I was wrong."
Whom am I talking to?
You talk to me when I am alone.
I am alone.
Each epoch dreams
the one to follow.
To dwell is to leave a trace.
I am not what I asked for.
I'm going to read a new poem.
So in this poem, I suppose
it's -- I would say that,
pursuant to things I said at
the beginning of the reading,
if you were looking at
the Adam and Eve myth now,
maybe we are now eating that
apple and about to be thrown
out of creation and in ways that
we might want to think about,
since there are not
representations of Adam
and Eve outside of the garden
where they look happier
than they did inside the garden,
even though people think it was
the so-called fortunate fall.
In this poem, there's a tree,
and someone is plucking a fruit,
so I have to assume that every
time that in the literary arts,
someone is plucking any fruit,
especially a fig, from a tree,
that that myth would
come to mind.
"Tree." Today on two
legs stood and reached
to the right spot as I saw it.
Okay, I just had
this hallucination
that the sound I'm hearing
was the curtains opening
and closing nonstop,
so I'm really glad they're
not doing that [laughter].
I was imagining during
the last poem
that these curtains were just
like on some automatic thing
doing this, and I thought,
"I think I can live with that.
I don't know what it
looks like, though."
[Laughter] Really glad
it's not happening.
Poetry's a complicated art from.
You're trying to make something
beautiful that endures,
that could be read when they
dig us up out of the rubble
to describe to future
people who we were.
After all, most of what we know
of prior civilizations comes
from their writing, their
architecture, their sculpture,
their artifacts,
their works of art.
That's how we know them.
Sometimes their tools, but most
of what we're making is going
to pulverized if that ever
arises, and the things
that will last are the things
that are in this building:
what we wrote, what we made on
the beloved acid-free paper.
If they dig up this library,
they will know who we were,
and so when you write nowadays,
you think about, you know,
who do you want them to know.
I mean, not just them.
Maybe Venusians.
I don't know.
Who were we?
This is a little bit
of that, this book.
Today on two legs stood
and reached the right spot
as I saw it, choosing
among the twisting branches
and multifaceted changing
shades, and greens,
and shades of greens, lobed and
lashing sun the fig that seemed
to me the perfect
one, the ready one.
It is permitted, it is
possible, it is actual.
The VR glasses are not yet
needed, not for now, no,
not for this while longer, and
it is warm in my cupped palm,
and my fingers close
round, but not too fast.
Somewhere wind like a
hammer stroke slows down
and lengthens endlessly.
Closer in, the bird
whose coin toss
on a metal tray never
stills to one face.
Something is preparing
to begin again.
It is not us.
"Shh" say the spreading
sails of cicadas as the winch
of noon takes hold and we are
wrapped in day and hoisted up,
all the ribs of time showing
through in the growing,
in the lengthening harness of
sound -- some gnats nearby,
a fly where the white milk-drop
of the torn stem starts,
dust on the eglantine skin,
white powder in the confetti
of light all up the branches,
truth, sweetness of blood-scent
and hauled-in light,
withers of the wild carnival
of tree shaking once as the
fruit is torn from its dream.
Remain, I think, backing
away from the trembling
into full corrosive sun.
Momentary blindness follows.
Correction.
There are only moments.
They hurt.
Correction.
Must I put down here
that this is long ago,
that the sky has been invisible
for years now, that the ash
of our fires has
covered the sun,
that the fruit is stunted
yellow mold, and when it appears
at all, we have no
produce to speak of?
No longer exists.
All my attention is
free for you to use.
I can cast farther
and farther out,
before the change,
a page turned.
We have gone into another story.
History floundered, or one
day the birds disappeared.
The imagination tried to go
here when we asked it to,
from where I hold the fruit
in my right hand,
but it would not go.
Where is it now?
Where is this here where you and
I look up, trying to make sense
of the normal, turn
it to life, more life,
disinterred from desire,
heaved up onto the dry
shore awaiting the others
who could not join us
in the end, for good?
I want to walk to the left
around this tree
I have made again.
I want to sit under it full of
secrecy, insight, immensity,
vigor bursting complexity,
swarm.
Oh, great forwards
and backwards.
I never felt my face
change into my new face.
Where am I facing now?
Is the question of good still
stinging the open before us
with its muggy destination
pitched into nothingness?
Something expands in
you where it wrenches
up its bright policing
into view.
Is this good?
Is this the good?
Under the celebrating
crowd, inside the silences,
it forces hard away all round
itself, where chanting thins,
where we win the war again,
made thin by bravery and belief.
Here's a Polaroid if you want.
Here's a souvenir.
Here now for you
to watch, unfold,
up close, the fruit is opening.
The ribs will widen now.
It is all seed, reddish
foam, history.
Do I have time for two more?
Yeah? I'm going to read one poem
which is more overtly political
and complicated,
and then I'll end.
This one again starts with --
I ask you to remember that in
the harbor of New York City,
there still stands a
statue with its arm
up in the air, inviting
-- -- in.
Won't even bring it up, but
it's an image that will occur
in the poem, so I
just don't know
if we still remember it's there.
I keep waiting for
the morning I wake up
and some conceptual artist has
just covered it in red paint
so that we have a
clearer sense of --
"My Skin Is" is the
title of the poem,
but it runs into the first line.
My skin is parched, on
tight, questioned, invisible,
full of so much evolution.
Now the moment is gone.
Begin in. My skin here, my
limit of the visible me.
I touch it now.
It is spirt-filled,
naturally selected,
caught in the storm
here under this tree,
propped up by history.
Which? I don't know which?
Be careful.
You can't love everyone.
Brought to by Revlon,
melancholy, mother's mother,
the pain of others, spooky
up close in this mirror here,
magnified to the 100th,
brutal no-color color.
What shall I call it?
Shall I pass, meandering
among the humans,
among their centuries?
No safe haven this.
No safe haven this as if,
this spandex over a void,
no exception, God watching,
though casually, paring, paring,
a glance once in a while.
What am I missing?
What am I supposed
to do now, suddenly?
What, at the last minute here?
What is there to fix?
Are we alone?
Am I packaged so firmly
for this short interval?
Vigorous skin, doomed
outside-ness of me,
sadder and no wiser here, blown
up so close, so only here.
I see you, net that skeins me
in, tight inside my inwardness,
at this border, judged,
at this edge,
bleeding when hit,
as was for a while.
Didn't know enough to leave.
Didn't see the farewell
right there in front of me.
Must it always end this way?
Must I ceaselessly
be me, reinvent you,
see the artifice us, feel
hand-to-face the childhood gone,
the starlight, the wind,
the gaze, the race,
the stranger not knowing, the
unsaid unsaid, unseen unfound?
Look how full of void
it is, this capture,
this skin no one can clean, the
thoughts right there beneath.
Of course you cannot see
me for this wrapping.
I notice the cover of your face,
the dress you hide beneath,
you sitting there reading me.
Pay mind. Pay it out, peering
as we are at each other here.
Dermal papilla, pigment layer,
nerve fiber, blood and lymph.
Can we still fit into the
strictest time so quick,
one click and hurry up?
We've been trying
forever now to get
out of this lonely
place, insides inside.
The movie of the outside
was all about exploring.
We explored.
We found what we
should never touch.
We touched.
We touch. "What's so unusual?"
we say. "You are
now mine," we say.
This is the feature coming on,
this future, so full of liking
and fine disclosure, a bud tip
pushing aside its sheath then
standing there, very whole now,
very official, open to damp,
heat, stippling,
shadow, to freckle,
slap, beauty or no beauty.
Please help me here,
as I can't tell.
The trees don't know.
The wind won't speak.
The gods should, but their names
are being withheld because some
of us are murdered and some of
us have mouths that keep saying,
"Yes, do that to me again.
I know it hurts, but
yes, I am an American,
and I like it harder
than you'll ever know."
This is Tuesday.
The day rises with its fist over
the harbor saying, "Give to me,"
and the day obliges,
saying, "More, more.
Do you want more?"
and the torch of dawn
says, "Yes, yes, more.
Ask for my identification,
my little pool
of identification
here on the only road,
arrested again among
the monuments."
And I thought I would
end the evening on a poem
by Zbigniew Herbert,
a Polish poet.
There are three great Polish
poets of the 20th century --
Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew
Herbert, and Szymborska --
and only Milosz and
Szymborska won the Nobel Prizes.
The strange country in which
the climate change conference is
taking place now, birthplace
of extraordinary poetry
and obviously great atrocity,
and we're having a climate
conference in the midst
of the most serious
coal-bearing chunk of Europe.
This is a poem that Milosz
wrote to a friend of his,
Ryszard Krynicki, and it's
called "To Ryszard Krynicki:
A Letter," and it's
really about, you know,
what is it to feel that you
must speak as the conscience
in your moment and that you
must speak out in a poem
such as the one that I just read
attempted when you really are
in a medium which just wants
to make something beautiful
and wants to do justice
to beauty?
And the lyric is trying
to do both at once,
and it's always trying to do
both at once, whether it's in,
you know, Emily Dickinson
or in The Pisan Cantos.
There's always this other
agenda which is, you know,
you're making art, and it's a
terrible struggle, but as --
those of us who undertake,
we always have
in mind the Akhmatovas
and the Mandelstams
and the great poets
who were courageous.
It seems like it's part of the
calling at the same time as it's
such an intimate desire, wanting
to make something beautiful.
So this poem is about that
conflict, and he's writing
to another poet, a friend.
I will just say that I
had the opportunity --
the last time I read this
poem, I read it in the --
the Warsaw Ghetto has been
turned into a kind of museum,
and the synagogues have been
turned into performance halls,
and -- which was horrifying.
And I had to sit up alongside
a Polish poet to read a poem
of mine that the
Polish poet, this --
in this case, Adam
Zagajewski, who translated --
read the translation into
Polish looking down from
where the rabbi would have been.
It was really historically
disturbing, but I read this poem
in English so he could read
the original in Polish,
because I thought let
the Polish here a poem
in Polish [laughing], and when
I went down, Ryszard Krynicki,
who recently died, just
recently, was in the audience,
and this poem was the poem
that Zbigniew Herbert long
ago had written for him,
and we had nine languages
between us,
none of them overlapping.
We had to use a translator
[laughter],
but it was his birthday, and
I had read the poem to him,
by some -- so maybe
the spiritual nature
of the synagogue had
not lost its power.
I'll end on this.
"To Ryszard Krynicki: A Letter."
I have to say I can hardly read
this poem without crying, so.
Not much will remain, Ryszard,
really not much of the poetry
of this insane century.
Certainly Rilke, Eliot, a few
other distinguished shamans
who knew the secret of
conjuring a form with words
that resist the action of time,
without which no phrase
is worth remembering
and speech is like sand.
Those school notebooks of ours,
sincerely tormented with traces
of sweat, tears, blood will
be like the text of a song
without music for the
eternal proofreader,
honorably righteous,
more than obvious.
Too easily we came to
believe beauty does not save,
that it leads the lighthearted
from dream to dream to death.
None of us knew how to
awaken the dryad of a poplar,
to read the writing of clouds.
This is why the unicorn
will not cross our tracks.
We won't bring to life a ship
in the bay, a peacock, a rose.
Only nakedness remained
for us, and we stand naked
on the right side, the
better side of the triptych
of the Last Judgement.
We took public affairs
on our thin shoulders,
recording suffering, the
struggle with tyranny,
with lying, but you have
to admit we had opponents
despicably small,
so was it worth it to lower
holy speech to the babble
of the speaker's platform, the
black foam of the newspapers?
In our poems, Ryszard, there
is so little joy, the daughter
of the gods, too few
luminous dusks, mirrors,
wreaths of rapture,
nothing but dark psalmodies,
stammering of animulae, urns
of ashes in the burden garden.
In spite of fate, the verdicts
of history, human misdeeds,
what strength is needed
to whisper in the garden
of betrayal, a silent night?
What strength of spirit
is needed to strike,
beating blindly with
despair against despair,
a spark of light, a
word of reconciliation
so the dancing circle will last
forever on the thick grass,
so the birth of a child and
every beginning is blessed,
gifts of air, earth,
and fire and water?
This I don't know, my friend,
and is why I am sending
you these owl's puzzles
in the night, a warm embrace,
greetings from my shadow.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Oh, I can stay here.
[ Applause ]
>> Jorie, thank you.
Now I'd like to welcome up
onto the stage Philip Bobbitt
and our principal deputy
librarian, Mark Sweeney.
On behalf of the
Library of Congress, --
>> You going to arrest me?
[Inaudible response]
>> -- I am pleased to award the
2018 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt
National Prize for Poetry
to Jorie Graham for Fast.
>> Thank you.
[ Applause ]