>> From the Library of Congress, in Washington, DC.
[ Silence ]   >> Good evening everyone.

It's a pleasure to welcome you here, and to introduce tonight's event.
It's featuring our new Witter Bynner Fellows.
This marks the 14th year of this fellowship,
and with the library's Poet Laureate Consultant
in Poetry selects two poets to organize a reading
in their hometown, and then travel here to participate in a reading
and a recording session for the library's archives.
The aim of the fellowships is to encourage poets and poetry,
and the previous 16 fellows --
poets such as Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson,
California Poet Laureate Carol Muske Dukes,
Kingsley Poetry award winner Carl Phillips have proven
to be exemplars of the art.   So have many of the others.

We don't want you to think it has to be somebody
who receives a formal award that receives a great deal,
and has a great deal to give to the whole flowering
of poetry in this country.
Our two new fellows, Robert Bringhurst and Forrest Gander,
are a wonderful addition to the library's long line
of affiliated poets and writers.
And we are especially honored to have our 17th Poet Laureate
in poetry, William S. Merwin, here to introduce both fellows.
And I want to thank him for his commitment to the library
and to celebrating poetry with us.
The author of more than 30 books of poetry and prose,
William Merwin has twice won the Pulitzer Prize,
he was our Rebecca Johnson Bobbitt prize winner in 2006,
and I would take up the entire evening if I were
to quote all the encomia [phonetic] and recognition that has come
to our remarkable and enormously welcome Poet Laureate.
Also want to welcome Steven Scwartz [phonetic], the Executive Director
of the Witter Bynner Foundation.
Mister Bynner, the namesake of the foundation,
was himself an influential early 20th century poet and translator,
as our current Laureate is a poet and translator as well.
And he would certainly have been proud
of the Poet Laureate, and of our new fellows.
So thank you, Steven, for your continued support
of the fellowship program, even through difficult times.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to say a word
about the Library of Congress, and our Poetry and Literature Center.
The library is the oldest federal cultural institution in America.
It is also the largest and the most widely inclusive library
in the world.
Our mission is to further the progress of knowledge and creativity
for the benefit of the American people,
and indeed for people everywhere.
Programs like tonight's are our showcases for this work.
It's great to see Pat Grey [phonetic], who long
and devotedly ran our poetry program here, with us tonight,
and also to welcome our -- the new head of the poetry program
with the library, who brings great dynamism, as well as experience
to us, Mister Robert Castro [phonetic].
Robert, where -- where are you?   Standing up [inaudible].

[ Applause ]
>> So, the library is a home for literature,
not just with our historic readings, with the recordings of --
of so many of the great poets of the 20th century, including those
in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in English, audio,
and a wealth of manuscript collections representing outstanding
American novelists, and of course such innovative poets
as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost,
and the Saint Vincent Millay, and -- and many others.
So I hope you'll visit our website to find more about the center
and the library, and our wealth of programs and resources.
And please join me in welcoming Steven Schwartz to the stage,
with once again our thanks for all he's done
for this important program.   [ Applause ]

>> Steven Schwartz: Good evening, and thank you so much.
The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry was established in 1972.
Our -- our fiscal year starts June the 1st,
and this fiscal year will be the beginning of our 40th year
as a small foundation, dedicated exclusively to the support
of poetry in American culture.
When I say a small foundation, we're certainly not the Ford Foundation
or the Rockefeller Foundation.
We were fortunate that Harold Witter Bynner left a small amount
of money -- some seed money.
And he wanted his love of poetry to continue after his death.
And we've tried our very best to make good use of those resources
in spite of the shenanigans of Wall Street.
Excuse me, I hope there's no one who's intimately involved
in Wall Street.
But I -- I must say that capitalism is a good thing if the fruits
of capitalism are put to good use.
And I think poetry is a -- is a great cause.
We can put resources into many different needs that are always
out there, but poetry is special.
It's about communication, it's about the individual spirits.
And as far as I'm concerned, we can never have too many poets.
And so this fellowship program is --
is really a way to honor the position of Poet Laureate,
and at the same time to provide an opportunity for poets
that the Laureate feel are worthy of further recognition.
So I'm very happy to have been a part of this,
it's been a great program.
I was somewhat reluctant to come to Washington
because the program's been going so well,
I was afraid I might do something to mess it up.
[ Laughter ]
>> Steven Schwartz: But I -- I -- I'm so appreciative, and --
and I really owe a deep, deep debt of gratitude to the Library
of Congress, and to all those who have helped make this possible.
Mister Billington, Carolyn Brown [phonetic], Patricia Grey [phonetic]
in particular, thank you so much.
They've all been so gracious and kind in --
in our dealings, and I'm just happy that this can continue.
And in closing -- I -- I won't go on and on.
In closing, I have a small token of my appreciation that I would
like to pass on to the Poet Laureate.
We spoke last night, and he said he had read Witter Bynner's translation
of Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching, which is called The Way
of Life According to Lao-tzu.
I've had this particular first edition on my desk
since I started working at the Witter Bynner Foundation
about 26 years ago, and I apologize that it's well worn,
dog-eared, and marked up.
But I think in some ways those are the best books, because it shows
that someone cared about what was between the covers.
So this book was -- was published in 1944,
and just so you understand the value of poetry,
at that time it cost a dollar.   [ Laughter ]

>> Steven Schwartz: I know because it's right here, 1 dollar,
which is probably about 20 dollars in 1944 currency.
Anyway, I would like to present this on behalf
of the Witter Bynner Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation board
of directors and myself to Mister Merwin,
and thank you so very much for your support.
[ Applause ]   >> William Merwin: Thank you, Steve.

That's a -- I'm extremely touched by what you've said,
and by this wonderful present.
I'm -- I -- I -- I have read it, and I shall read it again
with -- with you in mind.
It's a -- for those -- there must be no one in this room
who has not read the -- the -- the Lao-tzu.
But if there -- if there is,
you have something very extraordinary waiting for you.
It's one of the great documents in -- in -- in the history of humanity.
And the -- the -- it's a story of -- it is --
is beyond -- beyond description.
I know of -- I know of nothing of greater profundity,
or great resonance, and greater illumination
than those 81 small sections by -- by Lao-tzu, who actually did exist,
and who was a summary himself of a great -- great mysterious tradition.
And it's continued in something like Steve's present this evening.
The -- in introducing the -- this event this evening, and the --
the two -- the two new fellows,
this post as Laureate afforded me the happy opportunity
to choose two other poets to award for their gifts,
and how they have used them.
Preference, I was told, was to be given particularly to poets
who I thought deserved more attention
that they -- than they had received.
A Witter Bynner, but I -- I want to begin by saying something
about Witter Bynner himself.
Witter Bynner was born in Brooklyn in 1881, and studied at Harvard
with Wallace Stevens and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He was one of the poets and writers who found their way
to the American southwest in the early part of the 20th century --
Santa Fe and Taos [phonetic].
And he published 18 books of poems and translations
of Dong [phonetic] dynasty Chinese poets.
Trends change with the seasons,
and his own work does not now receive the attention it had
in his lifetime, which I think is unjust.
Partly for that reason, I would like to read one brief poem of his
to represent him at this occasion and in his name.
It is a relatively late poem called The Two Windows.
Out of my western window, the purple clouds are dying, edged with fire.
And out of my eastern window,
the full round moon is rising, formed of ice.
So beautiful.
Although the day go by and the night come on forever.
In this -- so beautiful is this momentary world.
Thank you, Mister Bynner.   [ Silence ]

>> William Merwin: The poets I would like to reward have many things
in common besides my admiration.
They represent different generations,
which in itself is a heartening assurance that the great tongue,
as the Welsh call their own language,
survives, and may go on forever.
Heartening to me who value this gift,
each of them is a true original, by which I do not mean
that they are heralds of novelty, but that they are writing
out of the original place from which poetry arises, the --


The language I present --
the language presents a dimension sometimes called vatic, the --
the note of prophecy, not in the -- not in the sense of -- of --
of predicting the -- the horse races of tomorrow, or the --
or the stock market, but of rising from a place beyond time.
And this is a -- this is a kind of -- this is a kind of echo and voice
that is here in every -- in every generation.
It's there in -- in the year the King Iziodine [inaudible] the Lord
high and lifted up and his train filled the temple,
that's that voice, or Blake's [phonetic] when the stars threw
down their spears and watered heaven
with their tears did he smile his work to see,
did he who made the lamb make thee?
And in Resca's [phonetic] when I was a wren I sang, you -- you hear that.
You hear that great voice, and we respond to it
without knowing what it is.
Both of these poets have been echoing that voice,
without trying to sound like it.
I mean if you try -- if you make that effort, you've lost it.
And the -- they have -- they have that in common.
Robert -- Robert is a -- is one of the --
the great learned members of his generation --
learned in poetry, and in languages.
And both of these poets are great explorers.
They're -- they're fearless wanderers, and they --

in other cultures, in other languages, in other times --
most recently Robert who -- who knows the modern languages,
the ancient languages of Europe, and Arabic has added Haida to his list
of languages, and his --
his languages and has translated the assembled myths of the Haida people
in two massive splendid volumes.
These -- the last bequest of -- of the great --
the last great shaman of the Haida people in 1880 to an anthropologist.
And he -- they -- they now exist in English.
And they are as extraordinary as the carvings on the [inaudible]
or the totem poles, or anything else.
And at the same time, a major breakthrough translation
in commentary on the -- on the great Pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides.
And I mentioned this to him as we came in,
and he said well they have a lot in common.
[ Laughter ]
>> William Merwin: I -- I want to let Robert speak for himself.
But the -- I -- I just want you to think of them as originals,
and as -- as great explorers.   And there's primarily,

and all through whatever they're dealing with,
poetry or prose, they're poets.
And they also have one other thing in common,
which adds to my admiration.
I don't -- I don't detect that either
of them has ever devoted any real attention to self promotion.
Bravo.   [ Applause ]

>> William, thank you very, very much.
And thank you all for coming here.
It was a great and utter surprise some weeks ago when my phone rang,
and Carolyn Brown from the Library of Congress --
of which I had heard before -- said she wanted me to come here,
and she wanted to give me some money.
Yes, I said.   Thank you.

[ Laughter ]
>> I'll come back to the anthropologist and that language
that our great Poet Laureate mentioned, at the end of this.
But do a little English first just for old times sake.
Let me start with a --
an abbreviated version of a long poem called Conversations


Trust that they were all like me,
fond of toads who often have a great deal to say for themselves.

In this poem a man talks to a toad.   The toad may listen, or he may not.

That perhaps is not the man's concern.
I suppose it is not the toad's concern either.
I am convinced though that the silences
of the toad are the most important.
I mean the most meaningful parts of the poem, filling the dark shelves
of the man's ears and the spaces between his sentences,
filling his syllables, filling the wrinkled stretched
and invisible skins of his words, filling his eyes wherever he looks,
and his lungs whenever he breathes.
So the silences of the toad would appear to be nothing
but empty spaces if the poem were printed.
But the man and the poem would not know how to speak it without them.
In this poem a man talks to a toad.
He tries at first talking to us, but not very hard.
It seems that he really wants to talk to the toad instead.


Behind you the owl, whose eyes have no corners,
the owl with her quick neck whose face -- who faces whatever she sees,
the raven with voices like muscle shell well water wound,
the dippers with voices like water on water, the [inaudible] drumming
in the Douglas fir and the harem flying in whole notes,
the king fisher crossing in dotted eights and in quarters, both silent.
Much later two voices like washboards, one base coarser
than gravel, one matzo crushed gravel and sand.
Their beauty bites into the truth.
One way to fail to be is to be merely pretty.
But that beauty, it feeds on you, we feed on it as you feed
on this moth-toned [phonetic] [inaudible].
He may yet be your dinner, his hazel [inaudible], the face like a goat's
but clean, and the name like brown corn silk.
Nerves spring from his forehead like fern [inaudible], like feathers.
He too is transformed.   This is the last life, toad.

Those Leets [phonetic] will be eaten.
That is the one resurrection, we who kill not to eat,
but to mark our domain, to build and breed in place of what is,
what we choose to create,
have reduced by that much the population of [inaudible].
[ Silence ]
>> My people no longer stare into water
and fire for clues to the future.
We no longer read even the signs in our faces and hands.
Instead we grind lenses and mirrors to sop
up the spilled light of the stars.
We decipher the rocks that we walk on too while we loot them.
Toad, as we level the future we make topographical maps of the past.
But the mirrors say at the edges of what we can see, things are leaving,
and taking their light with them,
flying away at 600 million miles an hour, or when the light
that is reaching us now was just leaving them 10 billion years ago.

Ten billion years seems long to us, toad, though to you it is little.
A few dozen times the age of your ancestors' graves in these rocks,
only two or three times the age of the oldest rocks we have found.
What is is too quick for our fingers and the tongues to keep up with.
The light outmaneuvers us, time and space close over us, toad.
The lock of the sky will turn, but not open.
We are where we are, and have been here forever,

longer that is than we can remember.
Your ancestors, toad, were kings in a world of trilobites --
fish, bryozoans [phonetic].
Do you know any stories, toad, of a species determined as mine is


Is it really so difficult, toad, to live and to die


My people have named a million species of insects.
They tell me that millions more are unnamed,
tens of millions among the living,
and hundreds of millions among the dead.
It is good news, toad, that no one can list what exists
in the world, but not good enough.
Named or unnamed, if it lives, we can kill it.
We owe to the stones that many chances,


In the blank rock of Precambrian time, the earliest creatures,
too soft to leave fossils, too light to leave footprints,
have left us old proteins and sugars as signatures.
We will leave chronicles filled with our griefs and achievements,
a poetry spoken by locusts as they descend.
[ Silence ]   [ Applause ]

>> That's the most pessimistic poem I've ever heard.
I don't know any [inaudible].   [ Laughter ]

>> This is a much shorter piece then
for the north Indian poet monk called Saraha [phonetic].
[ Silence ]   >> What is is what isn't.

What isn't is water.   The mind is a deer.

In the lakes of its eyes the deer
and the water must drink one another.

But there are no others, and there are no selves.
What the water sees is and is not what you think you have seen
in the water.
There is no something, no nothing, but neither,
no is and no isn't, but neither.
Now don't defile the thought that by sitting there thinking,
no difference exists between body and mind, language
and mind, language and body.   What is is not.

You must love and let loose of the world.
I used to write poems, and like yours they were made out of words,
which is why they said nothing.
My friend, there is only one word that I know now,
and I have somehow forgotten its name.
[ Silence ]   [ Applause ]

>> That's more cheerful, isn't it?   [ Laughter ]

>> Well, I'm gonna go back to -- I'm gonna go back to real life now.
This -- this -- this is a --
a very short poem that I wrote for the lady I am in love with,
who is the daughter of a geologist, and so the poem is called


I've always envied geologists because they have more time
than any of the rest of us.   [ Laughter ]

>> There will be nothing in the end, and that is everything
that ever was and will be.
Yet what is is sometimes every bit as resonant and clear
as nothing ever could be.
The philosopher of music says to the musician of ideas
that what has been can never not have been.
What is will be what has been soon enough,
and then its having been will sing its silent song,
as long as no one listens.   [ Silence ]

>> This is another short piece called all night wood.
You who live in the big city may be puzzled by a title like that,
but I live in the country where we spend all summer laying
in the firewood, and all winter burning it.
[ Laughter ]
>> And it is a great thing to wake up in the morning and find
that there is still something going on in the wood stove,
and you don't have to start all over again.
[ Silence ]
>> The crickets are talking, the termites are dancing,
the winged ones that do their off center pirouettes in the air,
and make love, and make small civilizations.
What is a civilization but love laid down in a skein.

What they spell in the air and their hunger for lives,
other beings are going to live, if anyone does, is not what they know,
but what cannot be helped.   And it cannot.

Like living, like dying, like jumping and singing,
like spinning and writing on air.
We are what we dream of, music and the truth,
and some unfinished weaving, a twilight to dance in,
a morning to waken, a fire to last until mornings.
[ Silence ]
>> Well it seems to me that I have devoted at least half my life
to studying Native American languages,
and the literatures that exist in them.
And it seems to me that this is still the most unwisely
and unjustly ignored subject known to North Americans --
or unknown to North Americans.
Part of the language that William mentioned is --
is spoken now by three or four old people in southern tip of Alaska,
and the northern archipelago [inaudible] the Queen Charlotte
Islands off the coast of British Columbia.

In 1900, 1901, a young man freshly hired by the Bureau
of American Ethnology, whose offices used to be at 1333 F Street,
just a few blocks up there, was sent to spend some time with the Haida.
He spent -- he was supposed to go for four months,
he ended up staying for a year.   He was supposed to do all kinds

of anthropological chores while he was there.
He was supposed to buy artifacts, and he was supposed
to study the social structure, and he was supposed
to measure people's elbows and [inaudible] things.
[ Laughter ]
>> He spent the entire time taking dictation from the oral poets
that he met in that world.
And so at the end of his year there, there was a stack
of Haida oral literature transcribed in Haida, about 7,000 pages
of it in his field note books.
He came back to Washington, DC, and spent the next two years
on the sixth floor of that building on F street --
the building that is not there any more -- typing up these texts.

He had recorded in pencil and paper the work
of about 20 different poets, I think about seven
of them are really interesting, and two of them are
about as good as poets ever get.
One of these two is an old man named Sky [phonetic].
He dictated to John Swanson [phonetic],
the anthropologist, three poems.
One of them is quite short, it lasts maybe 20 minutes.
The next one is a little longer,
it's about an hour and a half, two hours.
The third is an 8-hour work that took longer than eight hours for him
to dictate it to Swanson, because, you know, he was writing it down.
But if you just sat down and read it, it would take eight hours.
So it's shorter than The Odyssey,
but it's a good deal longer than a [inaudible].

But I have not been allowed eight hours, so I'm just going
to read you this -- the -- the first little bit of -- of --
of this poem, as a gesture of respect
to our ancestors in this continent.   [ Foreign ]

>> That was one of good family they say.
She was a woman they say.
They wove the down [phonetic] of blue folkens [phonetic]
into her dancing blanket they say.   Her father loved her they say.

She had two brothers, one who was older,
and the other was younger than she.   And they came to dance

at her father's town, and 10 canoes they say.
And then they danced they say, and then they sat waiting they tell me.
And someone, her father's head servant they say, went out
and asked them why are these canoes here?
These canoes are here for the head man's daughter.

The head man answered them they tell me,
better find your water elsewhere.   They left in tears they say.

They came again to dance on the following day in 10 canoes they say,
and again they were questioned they say, why are these canoes here?
These canoes are here for the head man's daughter.
And then he refused them again, and they went away weeping.

Then on the following day someone was there in a harbor seal canoe
and a broad hat that early morning they say.
Surf birds lived in his hat they say.
And after the head looked at him in his harbor seal canoe,
they asked him they say, why is this canoe here?
He said nothing they say.   They refused him.

They said to him they say, we cannot give you water.
There was something white surrounding the crown
of his hat they tell me.
It moved like breaking surf they say.
It was foaming and churning they say.
And when they refused him, the earth became different they say.
Sea water started to boil out of the ground.

Afraid the story will have to stop there.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you.

[ Applause ]
>> See if I can read Forrest's introduction.
[ Silence ]
>> 'Cause they're originals, and they're -- they're very distinct,
these guys -- whatever they have in common.
[ Silence ]
>> The title of one of Forrest Gander's books published
in 2004 is Core Samples From the World, which could serve
as a title for his work as a whole.
He too is an -- an explorer and a poet, and -- and -- and it's --
and poetry and its sources in English, and in other cultures,
and in the Hispanic world particularly, and in several
of the surviving indigenous languages and cultures
of Latin America and Asia.
A section of his book, A Faithful Existence, published in 2005,
considers the attempt to really hear poetry from -- from different --
from -- from different sources, and to hear the source
of poetry itself wherever it comes from.
The book increases -- includes a prose section called Homage
to Translation, in which he lists the obvious drawbacks,
and the handicaps of translation, and also the aspirations
and possibilities that arise from this indispensible activity, that,
you know, we -- we don't translate it because it's possible.
Everybody will tell you it's impossible,
of course it's impossible.   Language is impossible.

We don't -- we don't use it because it's possible,
we use this because it's absolutely essential, and it's, you know,
the -- and as for possibility, if the --
if you go through the mathematics of it, the bee can't fly.
But the bee doesn't go through the mathematics of it,
and it goes right on flying, so.
So the eye -- the idea, he says in translation,
is that it be not the equivalent, but equal of -- of the original.
And both the problems and the hopes that -- that grow from --
from the -- grow with the -- from the distance between --
between the two cultures and they at the same time multiply.
That's -- it's a -- it's a wonderful passage of -- of -- of --
of soul searching on this subject that we're --
that all three of us are very much involved in.
So the -- his own poetry is in separable from it, and his --
his prose is too, and his prose writing is -- is --
both of these poets -- and I neglected to say this about --
about Robert Bringhurst -- he's a -- he's a -- a noble and splendid,
and highly original essayist.
And the essays of course are all related to the poems.
They are, in fact, part of the poetry.
And that's true of Forrest's too.
And so I hope you'll see why I wanted both
of these guys to be here together.   Thank you.

[ Applause ]
>> And I just, you know, I just heard that W.S. Merwin was going
to be here, I didn't assume that he was going to be here
until about two hours before this reading.
And then I got really nervous.
Because I wouldn't likely be a poet without Merwin's work,
and my work started out as an imitation --
a bad imitation of -- of his work.
There was talk about Lao-tzu, and maybe I'll start with a --
a quote from Lao-tzu that also seems to speak to me
of what Merwin's work does.
Lao-tzu says, those who are not in constant awe,
surely some great tragedy will befall them.
[ Laughter ]
>> Thank you, Steven Schwartz, and thank you, Rob Casper [phonetic].
Thank you Mister Merwin [inaudible].
I'm going to start with a poem by a Mexican poet who I translated,
named Coral Bracho, in a book called Firefly Under the --
Firefly Under the Tongue.
And I'll read a little bit of the Spanish to start.
[ Spanish ]   >> Give me earth, your night,

and your fathomless wanderers in their jade quietude.
Welcome me, spectral earth, earth of silences and scintillations
of dreams [inaudible] constellations,
like filaments of sun in a tiger's eye.
Give me your dark face, your clear time to cover me, your soft voice.
In gentlest tones I'd speak with quartz sand,
and draw out this murmuring, this spring bordered by crystals.
Give me your night, the igneous expression
of your night, so I might begin to see.
Give me your abyss and your black mirror.
The depths open up like star fruit, like universes
of amethyst under the light.
Give me their ardor, give me their ephemeral sky, their occult green.
Some path will clear for me, some fringe in the coastal waters.
Among your tenebrous forests, earth give me silence and intoxication.
Give me a water of time, the flickering and flaking ember
of time, its exultant core, its fire,
the echo under the deepened labyrinth.
Give me your solitude, and in it beneath your obsidian fervor,
from your walls, and before the breaking day give me
in a crevice the threshold and its further flamboyance.
[ Silence ]   [ Applause ]

>> You just make me nervous if you clap after every poem.
But --   [ Laughter ]

>> -- if you have any claps at the end that'd be okay.
[ Silence ]   >> A clearing.

And this -- this is a poem I wrote in collaboration
with a photographer named Raymond Meaks [phonetic],
who was photographing rudimentary mining operations
in Burma -- or Myanmar.   A clearing.

Where are you going ghosted with dust, from where have you come.
Dull assertiveness of the rock heap, a barren monarchy, wolf spider,
size of a hand, encrusted with dirt at the rebel's edge.
But crosses here goes fanged or spiked, and draws its color
from the ground, its zenthic [phonetic] shadow at the edges.
Where are we going, ghosted with dust.
From where have we come.
Stretcher loaded with clods, by a spavinged [phonetic] work shed.
What does it mean, a cauterized topography.
One step forward, and he is with us.
One step back, another realm absorbs him.
The sense of epic loosened unstrung, each one thinking it is the other
who recedes like a horizon,
the miraculous cage visible under his skin.
I cannot be discarded, his eyes say.   A flute that plays one note, a face.

In the open pit at noon, men waning in brightness.
I can be read, say the rocks, but not by you.
The air burnished, almost mineral, like a thin peel of mica mound
in the photograph, iris in the eye.
What does it mean, a cauterized topography.
The salvage rocks, the color of all else,
from all else, the color of rock.
I can be read, say her eyes, but not by you.
As if the land had abandoned itself,
rain flushed from the nuded hills, soil powders in wind.
One step forward, and we are with them.
One step back, another realm absorbs us.
Don't pick up the rocks, he says, because rocks belong to the dead.
Zenthic shadow at the edges, the distance flat
as horse hair plaster, all depth sponged away.
Black nole [phonetic] of palings, there's nothing between his eyes
and ours, not even invitation.
Each stone carrying its death sentence into the animate world,
fly, maggot eating the red ant brain.
The sense of epic loosened unstrung, light broken off in the air.
The twig's shadow has the same quality as the shadow of a man.
Glance held, an afterglow, all depth sponged away,
the distance flat as horse hair plaster.
Iris in an eye, mound in the photograph.
Don't pick him up, rocks say,
because the dead belong to the rocks.
Encrusted with dirt at the rebel's edge,
wolf spider the size of a hand.
A man's shadow has the same quality as the shadow of a twig.
What crosses here goes fanged or spiked,
and draws its color from the ground.   The air burnished, almost mineral.

[ Silence ]
>> And I -- my, you know, I have a degree in geology,
that was my first career.   I'm a failed geologist.

But this is a poem about a stone used by Native Americans.
This particular stone came from Colorado,
and it's called a mano [phonetic], Spanish word stuck to it.
So it was used to grind meal in a matate [phonetic].
So someone sent me a mano and asked me to write a poem about it.


Mano. In microscopic pocks of a palm-size granite stone,
traces of green corn, perslane [phonetic], snake fat,
and pinion fused with smeared roots, and bee weed pollen, okra dust,
which drifts summer long into the scalp of a woman kneeling, intent,
and bent over a light bitten stone basin, her muscles flexed trapezius
to triceps, the wrist thick, working a short orbital swipe,
hand stone taking the curve of palm cut,
and her torso's weight falling through.
While swallows dive and veer along the sheer cliff,
the warm scabbed heel of her palm bears down, heel of palm,
unto and into the skirling sound, stone merged with the hand
that grinds it wheelwise, the maker breath blown,
alive in her tool, live.
Flies fussing and landing, her hair fallen across her eyes,
radiant, upbeat, leaf trilled.
And into this cadence is inset the slower cadence,
to which she rocks her baby when he cries.
And all the variable tempos of her breath,
her body's measure countless breaths, decibels of fullness,
days utterance, and stress, all this pressed
against the salt vesicles into the stone.
Into the pocked stone goes a rapid hair brushed from the hand
that flinced [phonetic] the hide in late eye long afternoon,
when red ants pour from holes in rocky soil,
ticking across flush grass, square headed ants toward a garden
where three guardian turkeys are staked to peck the leaf eating ants.
A minor victory, the garden greens up, registering in the eyes
of the woman who scuffs stone on stone in the flood buckling blare
of violence and time, that pockets her light in our --
our light, as the pupil narrows in its lens, and we bend, kneel almost,
in a clearing to pick up and weigh the rock.
Hawk glide our hand, where millenniums gone, her hand had been,
who winks out when we come clear to whom.
On a weedy hillside, where someone kneels in the now, even now,
beyond our still flow, looking.   [ Silence ]

>> And this -- this is a Virginia poem.
I'm from Virginia and grew up here -- not that here is Virginia,
I lived in DC too, but grew up about 15 minutes from here in Virginia,
and collaborated with a photographer named Sallie Mann [phonetic],
who went to the same summer camp I did
in Rockbridge County, who's a photographer.
And this poem is based on a photograph
of hers called Road and Tree.   [ Silence ]

>> Loosened road, first letter.   Evening spooked with light.

Quarter moon rode with the darkness inside it,
and full moon sky with the tree inside it.
Curved road in the gloaming, oak trunk a vector
of force punched upward,
held in place by the stenciled circle of light.
Lit road bearing a trunk of its own darkness, circle of light split
like a cat's eye, road curling left, eye cutting right,
barely there in the soft dirt.
Footprints and dog prints commingling in the throat
of the road, where voices also have fallen with pollen.
There is an inner landscape, for even as light came back like bees
to the camera, proclaiming the photograph, the place altered,
never availed itself at all.   A hem of cirrus brushed the sun,

the Carolina rens [phonetic] cheery gave way to a full moon
in the afternoon, and little grass frogs.
Dried puff balls detonated into a cloud
of gold spores as a hoof lifted.
And even if it had pictured a real terrain for one moment,
of what place is it a memory now.
The image strands itself, a word not loose
from the language, a tooth under a pillow.
And the place itself was neither fully read nor erased,
since it never ceased being written.
Only a word was pronounced, only the instrument clicked.
[ Silence ]   >> Anniversary.


Not to, not, not to be known, always by my wound.
I buried melancholy's larva and followed you.
I gathered myself like the dusk to the black tulips
of your nipples, tulips, tulips.   For seven days we locked the door,

we scoured the room with bird's blood.
And for a little while in the hollow where your throat rose
from between your splendid clavicles, rose, rose.
Our only rival was music, the piano of bone whiteness.
Nor did the light subside, but deepeningly contracted the rawness
of the looking, the quiver.   [ Silence ]

>> And I'll finish with this poem.
[ Silence ]   >> To the reader.


Although you are looking for something else,
in the mirror you can't avoid them, can you?
The wrinkles of sarcasm, the crowfeet of insomnia,
and the bleary eye of hesitation,
and the silent voice saying look what time it is, and your name,
and why don't you lie down so you'll be rested for work tomorrow.
Then the dream snaps on, and yet a distant hope keeps you awake.
You are still awake, aren't you?   Although it is late now,

and the question you are asking has become something different,
how has the tactual amnion of habit failed to protect you?
The night discharges itself into hills, into the river's fan gravel
and swallow holes, man grove roots thickening around lost fish hooks.
In the gas station sign Pegasus lights up
and flickers out, and lights up again.
And muscles twitch in the attendant's jar as he stares
into the bay, a timing chain part number
on the slip of paper in his hand.
While stars flare and the waitress crumbs the tablecloth,
are you just opening again to the lust to be filled with something?
What is it?
Around you the nameless countless things hullabalooing in silence.
Sop up your looking at the very moment of contact,
at the critical instant when your line of sight lifted from the mirror
and gently set bound again into a groove
of the revolving earth catches, and appearance pours out like frog song.
It was me, yes, following, when you led and when you fell behind.
How long it took us to get here, we, who belong to this time
in all its thin passages, and in its fullness.
Only let me press my mouth to the back
of your hand before you move it from my face.
Thank you very much [inaudible]   [ Applause ]

>> Thanks to both our readers, and I would like to invite them both
up to receive their Witter Bynner Fellowship awards.
So Forrest and Robert please come up, I have an envelope for you.

On either side of me.   Thank you.

Another round of congratulations for our Witter Bynner fellow.
[ Applause ]
>> I hope you'll join us for our reception and book signings
with the fellows afterwards outside.
If you're not also on our email poetry list,
there are signup sheets outside with information too next
to them on upcoming events.   On Wednesday, May 4th,

in the Coolidge Auditorium our Poet Laureate, W.S. Merwin will read
for the spring reading to close out the season.
So I hope I see you there, and thanks again for coming out.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.