>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
>> So you might wonder, what on earth do an architect
and a poet have in common?
Well, not to mention being Stanley Plumly [inaudible] both my wife
and I and my children, tried this out.
As an architect I create spaces in buildings and spaces
between buildings and these spaces often evoke feelings of comfort
and tension and architecture in it
of itself I think is oftentimes reflective of today's society.
And I think this work is not unlike the work of Stanley Plumly
who builds not with brick and mortar but builds with words,
words that inspire us and tease us and comfort us
and tease all of our senses.
Well it is a pleasure for me to introduce Mr. Plumly.
He is a Poet Laureate of Maryland and was named to that post in 2009
by Governor Martin O'Malley.
His most recent poetry collection, Old Heart,
was a National Book Award finalist.
His work has been honored with 8 Pushcart prizes,
a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship among many other awards.
He is a Maryland-distinguished university professor
and founded the Masters of Fine Arts and Creative Writing
at the University of Maryland in College Park.
His work has been published in the Atlantic Monthly,
the New York Times, the Paris Review and many, many other places.
So ladies and gentlemen, please join me
for a warm welcome to Stanley Plumly.
[ Applause ]
>> This is like the battle of the bands except, simultaneous.
[ Pause ]
If we have a moment or two, if I keep it brief,
maybe we can have some questions that I might be able to answer.
"Simile." This heart, I found at low tide this morning,
accurate to a fault, hand-sized, heart-shaped,
with the thick weight of a heart.
A perfect piece of limestone cut by hand by the sea, who knows how long,
brought up from the bottom, again and again,
split like our own hearts, nicked from the top half down,
as if in another life it had been real, stone atrium, stone sorrow,
stone ventricles, stone arteries and veins.
And these glittering halves of oyster shells,
I picked this up this afternoon, like stones worn into shape,
swirled, half-eaten-out, still oiled and pearly-wet
with edges sharp enough to clean a fish.
Imagine that the oysters have survived like eyes
of the other worldly or symbols of some sexual potency,
look-alikes for testicles, or a woman's soft insides
as we drink them down by swallowing them whole.
In the doctrine of signatures, things become themselves
as something else, as we are who we are word of mouth.
Then I found a bird, a kind of gull, eaten by the fish and other birds,
one missing wing, one eye.
The rest of it so rendered past resemblance, you throw it back
into the void, the chaos it came from.
Yet the moment it goes under, it's a memory, a metaphor we say.
For what we can't quite name, tip of the tongue, whistle in the bone,
death in its variety, its part-by-piece detail.
Like the skull washed up one lost-and-found new year,
fallen from the ocean sky, dead off the moon, something to conjure with,
now set on the desk on the bony back of its head,
neither human nor animal but brilliant white brain-coral, pitted,
scalloped, furrowed at the brow, its stone,
teardrop-shaped face a mask for mourning.
Unlike the shapely clouds, changeable, emotional,
a skein of moving mare's-tails, a skimmer's broken wing,
cumulonimbus palaces
where once-and-future beings act out their human longing.
I went down to the sea, the source of life,
it was filled to overflowing.
The blue horizon line, however many miles, parted nothing more than air
from bluer water, though it was poetry to say what it looked like.
[ Applause ]
There's a word I used to get very tired of,
perspective as in keeping things in perspective.
Margaret says it's nothing more than perspective.
She's right, of course: perspective being "the art
of delineating solid objects upon a plane surface so as
to produce the same impression of relative positions and magnitudes,
or of distance, as the actual objects do when viewed
from a particular point," Oxford Standard, the point being the full
and light-filled moon looked at, here in mid-October,
from the perspective of walking away from it down Beacon Court.
Perspective was what I lacked an ability
with when I was an art student trying to sight down the row
of different-storied buildings on the far side of the street,
each one distinct yet connected, as in a Hopper or Utrillo,
sun shadow or pencil-marking rain.
Night, though, is another thing altogether.
I'd just turned to consider the blue cloud passing
like a floating island nation on the opposite end of the sky,
then turned back only to realize how high the moon had traveled, had,
in no time, risen as if lifted.
Perspective, Margaret said: like the problem I had drawing depth
of field, the illusion of a line diminishing,
the famous looming stones of graves in Queens foreshadowing the skyline
of Manhattan, since perspective is as much about the imagination
as it is about Brunelleschi.
As memory, too, like too much in our lives, is perspective,
and between now and then often all we have.
Those, for instance, whom we've loved and unloved,
forming a line behind us, eventually fade,
in the long century photograph, to the size of children or the half
of half of nothing of what they were.
I don't have the answer.
Come close, we say, but keep your distance,
as if perspective were a dance.
And as you walk away you'll disappear,
as if you'd not existed, were never here.
[ Applause ]   [ Pause ]
I'm a-- I'm a sucker for sunsets and-- but who isn't, right?
And sun sets over the water, the great water especially
with a nice glass of Italian red wine is an experience you
In a white [inaudible] chairs, on the way of crest of the doom,
looking out over the great green de cobalt colder blue of the Atlantic.
Drinking decadence in large [inaudible] portions,
taking it in like sea air, the view an ocean silence.
It's difficult to imagine, not being here or worse,
never being here again or worse, never having been here.
My mother never saw an ocean
and Wallace Stevens never traveled except by Pullman to Key West
and all the stops between.
He speaks in Madame Bovary, of his mother as the raven-waiting parent,
though mother also means the earth welcoming the child back
to the beginning and end.
Naturally the sun is falling which had risen
in first light only this morning,
burning its stunning star path perfect to this place of witness.
Now that it's arose, disintegrating, in all the colors of the spectrum,
all at once, we can look at it the way it is on fire.
The way to the big male of the blue jay on the snow fence to the right,
watching with us, waits for the dark or what passes for the dark,
a kind of water surface blue and the second the sun is gone,
he's gone just over us a few feet at the most,
likely into the safety of a hedge.   We'd been imagining the need
to recognize the moment's moment before it disappears
as if you could know a thing before it happens.
Life in the future tense would in fact, like sunlight on the water,
here and there, we live in one time but think in another.
We were, if not exactly close to drunk.
So we lift into the light our full glasses.
The jay was beautiful especially in the air, blue on blue.
His white wing spots and the white touch on the tail,
shining in that instant of the sun slipping under.
Not once in his happiness or reverence
or indifference did he sing, complain or say anything.
He flew in a line drawn in time from now to then.
I can still see him though finally he was nothing
but a blur inside the death of everything that happens.
[ Applause ]
Cancer. Mind I know started at a distance, 520 light-years away
and fell as stardust into my sleeping mouth yesterday at birth
or that time when I was 10, lying on my back looking
up at the cluster called the beehive or bias of the name
or the constellation Cancer, the Crab,
able to move its nebulae projections backward and forward,
side to side in the tumor Hippocrates describes as carcinoma
from "karkinos," the analogue in order
to show what being Cancer looks like.
Star, therefore to start, like waking on the best day of your life
to feel this living and immortal thing inside you.
You were in love.   You were a saint.
You were going to walk the sunlight blessing water.
You were almost word for word forever.
The crown, the throne, the thorn, now to see the smoke,
shining in the mirror, the long half-dark of dark
down the hallway inside it.
Now to see what wasn't seen before the old land landscape fading
from the window, the druid soul within the dying tree,
the depth of blue coloring, the corn flower, the birthday ribbon,
river of a road and a young man who resembles you, opening a door
in the half-built house you helped your father build,
saying in your voice, come forth.   [ Applause ]
[ Pause ]
Well, we'll continue this happiness, arbitrarily.
Death I've decided is gray.
And for me at least not the Raphaelian angel gray of doves,
nor the gray brown hermit gray of Whitman's Thrush nor the nettle
in the hedge or neutral garden thorn nor the English gray
of lawns leading to the limestone gray of [inaudible] sets.
Though I love such examples of monotone and texture,
yet none of them the gray of the mining gray of Philipsburg,
the silver in the ground or the asphalt gray of parking lots,
drifting coast to coast, sea to shining sea, ocean to gray ocean,
or the nickle diming rain that starts each morning
in the past and fills the day.
The remnant dressed in black, the bride in white, I saw them more
than once and knew the circle of their color of gray nowhere
in nature, unless the wind or breath of life or air walled
in suggests a gray interior in things.
The way we see it in the mirror, manifest in hair.
And one time the lyric of the face.
The change is imperceptible but there, the same warm look of ash,
turning into smoke though heavy like a leaf.
Like leaves of pages in my mother's favorite books,
they're gray on gray, the substance of the shadings of the soul,
souls like Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina and other country girls
who marry to be safe than kill themselves.
Women of the century, who understand how gray is
like a cancer nothing cures.
Even language written down is black on white,
a stay against the moment's god, oblivion and the soft gray earth
under the hard gray stone.
Gray, the gravity we'll see in the camera of the eye, between life
and death, the photograph, a spirit, flesh and blood.
Something like the smear of egg and sperm, studied through a lens.
My thoughtful baby sister in her Sunday special dress,
her eyes half-closed to filter out the sun.
I'm thinking too beside her, leaning on a doorway my childish hand
of shadow on my head, 1944, our uncles at the war.
Gray Gaberdine.
My sister will out live me in that dress,
who one day post a picture, thin as air.
We think the light is blinding, it is failing.
[ Applause ]   [ Pause ]
This is a poem entitled, "400 Mourners."
The sizes of the crowds and those burn baby burn days were
at best estimates, depending on who the police, the press,
the thousands in protest was counting.
The body count we called it.
And after the arrest, we were lined up alphabetically
for fingerprints and phone calls.
It wasn't all that much, though the numbers made the difference,
since they argued significance.
That was later, at the dead end of the '60s.
The rallies against the war, mixed with the killings of the Kennedys
and King and the nuclear meltdown of democracy
as the convention in Chicago.
But at the beginning of the decade it was man on the moon,
hand on the heart, Ralph Abernathy, who had recruited most of us,
came by one day just to say hello.
We were on the white side of the table,
assumed to be eligible black voters on the other.
Greenville was as liberal as a GOP in Mississippi.
The delta, almost as ancient as the flooding of the Nile.
The names, the spellings, the signatures,
like maps of a world once flat and the heat and the dog's breath,
weight of the air and the wet dust needle work of pine.
People had died here under a different register
as thousands more, thousands
of nautical miles Southeast would die, who had not voted.
Ralph said the numbers finally didn't matter.
The idea of change was enough.
He meant an idea, whose time has come.
The few new voters each seemed wise and old, older than anyone we knew,
older than parents or grand parents, older than the country
where angers life expectancy.   They had looked into the sun.
They had looked into it a long time.
The Carter family newspaper spoke of joy with sometimes grief
as if the happiness of change felt like a passage.
This is 50 years now, gone.
It's crazy that so much of it came back to me, witnessing the funeral
of a child, the countless car cortege wound through the towns
with her wastes as if the hearse could not quite find its way.
There is no end to the death of a child so that
when we detoured passed her elementary school,
everyone was out in the cold, by the hundreds, waving.
[ Applause ]   Is my time up?
[ Applause ]   I'll read one more poem.
[ Pause ]
More history.   Long Companions.
We are born the year Hitler invades Poland.
Blitzkrieg, lightning war, war lightning.
We are three months old and two and a half
when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor.
Kamikaze. God wind, and six when the war is over.
All our uncles surviving in their uniforms, our father head
of the local National Guard and responsible for German prisoners
of war, our grandfather brings from Washington
to cut and plant Virginia.   Some stay on.
After the war, we moved to far Ohio, where a Lindy Brubaker [phonetic],
prisoner, prison camp survivor can't hold his food.
He turns to God presiding in 50 years at our mother's funeral.
The girl who loves dancing, smoking and the movies shine cinema,
the little theater, the best years of our lives, the Ottery Westerns.
Our father takes tickets to earn extra then comes home night,
tight to victory heights in order to rise at dawn to his real job
at French oil, like winter Korea comes and goes, McCarthy on TV,
alive and angry, the moon drifting, the sun rising
on the multi-colored back of the rooster.
Fear the word of the day.
Russia, China taking over their various massive numbers,
overwhelming Mongol, Manchurian, Menachian, Mississippian, the black
and white of cold war everywhere.
Gray pictures in the news, gray lives.
We are 20 to almost through our teens and ready in a steady year
or two to vote for Kennedy.
Outlived by everyone, including Johnson, Nixon and Cuban
and even the Viet Cong contraction of Viet Nam Cong-Sam, Uncle Sam,
Yellow Peril, [inaudible].
We survive our middle 20s thinking purer thoughts
and allowing the violent '60s to become the virulent violent '70s.
Fingerprinted, visited, interrogated, inoculated.
Then we grow into a life of unintended consequences, promises,
spilled milk, the Great Wall, the Berlin wall,
any wall on which too much is written.
Tear them down, start over, love our friends anew,
watch them disappear one by one, watch the face
of the deep, darken and rollin'.
Watch the tallest window buildings break and fall.
The heart bobs and breaks.
There is fire in the mirror, a ghost peripheral profile at the eye.
Time passes, light pours in themselves, a happiness.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
My little time-- my threat is if you don't have any questions,
I'll read some more poems.   Yup?
>> Hi. Thank you so much for your poems.
My question is--
>> You have to speak up, we have so much competition here.
Alright.
>> My question is how do you choose the topics in which you write
and how they had been developed?   Do you outline?
Or do you just let it come alive?   Thanks.
>> Well I guess the cliche answer is you don't choose "topics".
They choose you.
And with that I guess I mean that your, what-- range of material--
I don't like the word subject, or topic or whatever,
because it assumes a rational process that is I think
against the whole point of writing anything,
maybe poetry, in particular.   Instead, you have a kind of--
I guess it's something you're practically born with,
a feeling toward your experience.
A feeling that you bring into the world and respond to the world with
and that guides almost everything you think about
and certainly everything you write
so that whatever the ostensible subject
or what Wallace Stevens calls the appearance subject,
there's always the secret subject and the secret subject is that,
that under [inaudible] that feeling you bring
to whatever the occasion is.
And that's why poets tend to have more or less, a singular tone
which gets varied, but nevertheless is their base note,
is their bottomline, is the music out of which they hear the language.
That sounds very abstract.
I don't think I can do better than that.
I'd like to think that what I've been reading today is an example
of variety within unity that there is consistency in that tone.
People have different tones, I mean, some people I think,
sadly are tone deaf to themselves.
They don't hear how they respond to other people and maybe we're all
like that for a while and a part of growing up, part of becoming aware
of other people in a very positive way, is that you can see yourself
in them, you can see yourself outside yourself
and you could measure or register how you come over, how you sound,
what you're saying but mostly how you're saying
and how you say a thing is everything.
I guess that's what I mean by the tone.
Remember your mother saying, "Don't use that tone of voice?"
Yeah. You can say it, whatever you were going to say it,
a hundred different ways but there's one tone
>> Oh, there we go.
So how do you choose the poems that you're going to read at a reading?
What do you look for in your poems?
Do you try to have a consistent voice or tone
or do you look for a variety?   Or how do you choose them?
[ Pause ]
>> I learned a long time ago to never anticipate your audience.
What happens is you end up condescending.
You end up making a mistake.
And I realized this-- how many years ago?
About a long time ago, that the moment you get up there you realize,
you've screwed up and what you end up doing is not reading any
of the poems you've written down to read.
And you're searching for whatever it is you think at this moment,
in that existential moment, what will--
what will be best between the, you know,
the many others here so to speak.
Then I came to the wisdom that maybe the best way
to prepare the reading was to read the poems that work for you now
and now can be quite a while and that sometimes you read--
in that last poem I read, I haven't read for a long, long time
but somehow being in Washington brought it out.
It's a little history lesson,
[inaudible] history, lesson I suppose.
But you have to be, it's the same with teaching.
If you're not learning when you're teaching, you're not teaching.
And if you're not having fun, God forbid, I sound sentimental here,
being moved by her own work, like Dickens, then it's not going to work
for you and they're going to hear that,
the audience is going to hear it.
They're going to hear it in your voice and they're going to see it
in your whole body language so that there are some poems
that never get read, a lot of them.
A lot of the poems that you write never get read.
For some reason, they just are not audience poems for what--
they're more private than that.
They're more solitary than that or singular than that
and they're probably left better on the page for that individual reader.
Hope that doesn't sound too precious but I think that's true.
Anybody else?   Oh, okay.
[ Pause ]
>> You mentioned the teaching just now.
And I'm a-- I'm teaching at College of Southern Maryland myself.
I was wondering if you could talk about the,
how teaching influences your writing or vice versa
and how you fit both roles into your writing life, I guess.
[ Pause ]
>> Well teaching is, well for me at least, a way to make a living.
It has absolutely nothing to do with my writing.
However, it does have a lot to do with my reading.
And the one great thing about teaching is
that it keeps you in the game.
It keeps you in the past in a rich way and teaching is
about making the past, or making memory alive in the moment
as if it were contemporary and I think it is.
And it's also; it's a way of extending yourself
as well as enriching yourself.
Woe to the writer in his workshop or her workshop,
whoever makes the mistake of bringing his or her own work
into that workshop that is death on wheels.
You never want to do that.
You are a teacher and a leader in the workshop
and that workshop has nothing to do with your writing,
only with your own experience as a writer.
Trying to talk to other people, younger people usually,
about what will make their work richer and better and deeper.
But as for its relationship to one's own work, stay out of that.
That's a whole different world.
If you start to confuse those two, your shoes as Mark Strand once said
in the poem, "Your shoes will fill with urine.
[ Laughter ]   [ Inaudible Remark ]
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.