TOM PUTNAM: Good evening. I’m Tom Putnam, the Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library colleagues, I thank you for coming out on this cold winter’s night. I want to first acknowledge the underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forum Series, including lead sponsor, Bank of America, along with Boston Capital, The Lowell Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, the Boston Foundation, and our media sponsors, the Boston Globe, NECN and WBUR, which rebroadcasts our forums on Sunday evenings.
Allow me to begin by showing a brief clip of President Kennedy’s speech at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College in which he speaks not only of Frost, but also on the role of the poet and artist in our society. There are some blips in the tape from when the footage was first shot in October of 1963.
[audio clip]
PRESIDENT KENNEDY: Robert Frost was one of the granite figures of our time in America. He was supremely two things: an artist and an American. A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces, but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.
In America, our heroes have customarily run to men of large accomplishments. But today this college and country honors a man whose contribution was not to our size but to our spirit, not to our political beliefs but to our insight, not to our self-esteem but to our selfcomprehension. In honor of Robert Frost, we therefore can pay honor to the deepest sources of our national strength. That strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant.
That strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. “I have been,” he wrote, “one acquainted with the night.” And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. And it’s hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself.
In a democratic society, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.”
I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, it’s wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.
I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respected throughout the world not only for its strength, but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity, but also for personal distinction.
Robert Frost was often skeptical about projects for human improvement. Yet, I do not think he would disdain this hope. As he wrote during the uncertain days of the Second War:
Take human nature all together since time began …
And it must be a little more in favor of man …
So a fraction of one percent, at the very least …
Our hold on the planet wouldn’t have so increased.
Because of Mr. Frost’s life and work, because of the life and work of this college, our hold on this planet has increased.
[end audio clip]
TOM PUTNAM: A decade ago, before I joined the staff of the Library, I was teaching history to inner city high school kids at the time when Robert Pinsky became our nation’s Poet Laureate. Like many of my colleagues, I took his lead in trying to incorporate poetry into my classes and into my students’ lives. One of the poems my students most responded to and understood immediately was written by Charles Simic, entitled “Fear.” “Fear passes from man to man unknowing as one leaf passes its shudder to another. All at once the whole tree is trembling and there is no sign of the wind.”
Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia, and his childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. In interviews, he’s described himself as a product of history. “Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents.” At age 15, he and his mother moved to Paris, later joined his father in New York, and finally settled in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway.
It was during that time that he started writing poetry after observing one of his friends attract the best-looking girls with sappy love poems. He describes himself as a city poet, because “I’ve lived in cities all my life, except for the last 35 years.” During those years, New Hampshire has been his home, where he taught creative writing at UNH. He is the author of 18 books of poetry, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1990, and was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. In naming him the 15th Poet Laureate last August, James Billington said, “The range of Charles Simic’s imagination is evident in his stunning and unusual imagery. He handles language with the skill of a master craftsman, yet his poems are easily accessible, often meditative, and surprising with shades of darkness and flashes of ironic humor.”
It is a great pleasure to welcome Robert Pinsky back to the Kennedy Library. Mr. Pinsky served as Poet Laureate of the United States for three consecutive terms from 1997 to 2000, during which time he became a public ambassador for poetry, founding the Favorite Poem Project in which thousands of Americans read their favorite poems on tape and video. He teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program at Boston University, is the poetry editor for Slate Magazine, and in 1999 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is one of the few members of the Academy to have appeared on the Simpsons.
He claims that most of his poems are about the same thing: We live in a haunted ruin. Critic Lloyd Schwartz writes, “Robert Pinsky talks with a democratic warmth and intimacy to the common things of this world. His extraordinary poems remind us that he has always embodied the very ideals he proposes for what a poet can be.” Following tonight’s conversation, both of our guests have agreed to sign books, and their newest collections are on sale in our book store. It is a great honor to have you both here tonight.
For in the words of President Kennedy, “Your fidelity to your art strengthens the fiber of our national life.” Please join me in welcoming Charles Simic and Robert Pinsky to the Kennedy Library. [Applause]
CHARLES SIMIC: Let me say something. That was an amazing speech we just heard. I mean, it’s inconceivable today, anyone, any politician speaking …
ROBERT PINSKY: Just using the words … just to use the words “platitudes and pieties.” Imagine, it is hard to imagine, even a politician one admires, having the poise and courage to speak of “platitudes and pieties,” and towards the end, in celebrating Frost, he used the word “skeptical.”
CHARLES SIMIC: There was a (inaudible) after 9/11 when they brought the entire Congress to New York, and there was a ceremony and, of course, it was a year after 9/11, but Bill Collins read a poem; he was the Poet Laureate then, and what I remember -- it was part of a longer program -- he gets up to a lectern like this and he starts reading a poem. So they’re showing the Senators and the Representatives, and a few of them understood this was a poet reading a poem. But a number of others were kind of looking around, like, what is this? Kind of almost really annoyed. [Laughter]
ROBERT PINSKY: I do remember that. What you say inspired me to say that one of the few observations that I could make about my time in Washington where I met a certain number of people from the Hill, as they say, that’s also germane to that speech. I repeatedly found them to be smarter, more articulate, and more cultivated people than they seem to allow themselves to be in public. Very often a politician will have a much more nuanced mind and a subtler set of opinions and know more than that politician would have in the course of public life. A platitudinous, pious, anti-intellectual vein in American public life seems to have tightened its grip, so that to be a successful politician, to some extent, you have to conceal your intelligence, which …
CHARLES SIMIC: Which, clearly, you sound like a complete idiot. [laughter] They love you. They think, “He’s one of us.”
ROBERT PINSKY: To make a bipartisan remark, I watched the Kennedy-Nixon debates, the 1960 debates. They were both very articulate. And you also expect them to speak in sentences and paragraphs rather than in slogans or quips, the cliche of sound bites. Tom Putnam and I were talking, and I told him I had the impression that that speech was written by Dick Goodwin. Tom had the impression it was Arthur Schlesinger. We agreed that Kennedy characteristically edited speeches of that kind. Whoever wrote it also clearly felt that to pursue an idea for three minutes was not exorbitant, that you could develop an idea and it would not have to be over in 20 seconds. There was not like a soap commercial where you do it in 30 seconds and then you …
CHARLES SIMIC: The writer knew that Frost himself would be very skeptical of the speech. I mean, all this business -- what the artist should do for this country -- one could just imagine Frost, you know, rolling his eyes. So I took that into consideration.
ROBERT PINSKY: I guess it gives us morale about art. The segue in the speech to honoring our natural beauty and the beauty of our towns, both of those things, I mean, in those days, the idea of the environment and the ecology was still an aesthetic idea. That we can actually die from despoiling the environment hadn’t really occurred to anybody yet, but it turns out to be the case. But he went from that to the beauty of our towns and cities, and it’s something I find I’m sensitive to. I grew up in a historic town that’s almost completely demolished. So the way the skeptical, graceful, artistic ideal also just segued into these practical political concerns, it was very impressive.
CHARLES SIMIC: So we don’t have anything as good to do as that. Well, you know, I don’t want to stay with this subject, but I sort of remember the delight of driving in the country, the countryside in the ‘50s, where you still had, you know, signs, billboards, “Burma Shave,” you know, all that kind of stuff, which they got rid of. That was a big thing.
ROBERT PINSKY: Lady Bird Johnson.
CHARLES SIMIC: Lady Bird Johnson, yeah. Speaking of presidents and poetry, I was remembering while I was listening to Kennedy, I once heard LBJ reading Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” at the service commemorating something -- I guess he was still alive or maybe he was 100 years old -- Sandburg, I mean -- he lived forever, right? It was on the radio. I was riding through Ohio, and I heard it. Did he read well? I mean, it was just … You could see he enjoyed it, too. It was terrific, terrific. “Hard butcher of the world,” you know? Beautiful.
ROBERT PINSKY: I can think of a way to segue into reading poems.
CHARLES SIMIC: Sure.
ROBERT PINSKY: One of us could read. I have “Acquainted with the Night” here. It’s the poem that was alluded to. Do you want to read it? Shall I read it?
CHARLES SIMIC: Read it, read it.
ROBERT PINSKY: This is the Robert Frost poem. And I think I was underestimating what we’re about to hear. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the allusion was to one of the lesser Frost poems that are fairly well known, like the two paths in the woods. And this is a terrific Frost poem that is not Frost the figure of reassuring semi-bumpkin, rustic. It is in a town. Frost did a lot of his growing up in a mill town, in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
And for me, the setting of this poem, in my imagination, is Lawrence.
“Acquainted with the Night”
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
CHARLES SIMIC: It’s a very strange poem. It’s unlike any other poem by Robert Frost – it’s set in sort of an urban setting, and, I mean, you don’t find that. This sounds like he just read Franz Kafka, of course. And, of course, he didn’t. But the imagery is kind of symbolic and very abstract for Frost. I mean, Frost certainly wrote a lot of dark poems, but they’re always set in a really specific setting, like that old man’s winter night, I mean, which is a terrifying poem, but everything there is focused on details, a poem of a great many specific details. But this is odd, this is an odd one.
ROBERT PINSKY: Oh, “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” it’s got everything here.
It’s my secret book.
CHARLES SIMIC: “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” “All out of doors …”
I should say something about this poem. This, on the other hand -- if that’s Lawrence -- this is really a New Hampshire poem -- small, rural New Hampshire. I mean, small village, town, an old man who lives alone in an old house. I mean, you know, it’s true today, it was true 100 years ago.
“An Old Man’s Winter Night” All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss. And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; -- and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar Of trees and crack of branches, common things, But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what, A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can, It's thus he does it of a winter night.
ROBERT PINSKY: Such a great poem. We’re not going to, I mean, at some point we’ll talk about other things than Frost, but in the context of national things, Poet Laureate, the rest of it, what I feel so far after hearing those two poems and looking at the TV is we can be proud of an art that is not overeager to distract or reassure or sort of with a jovial chuckle say, “It’s all okay, it’s only computer graphics.” Or, “It’s fine.” And it suggests that the clock is neither wrong nor right. An old man can’t keep a house, or, if he can, it’s thus he does it of a winter night. And if there’s any reassurance, it’s in the beauty of it.
I can’t resist the kind of professorial observation about that poem. There’s one sentence in that poem that always amazes me for the sounds. This is a poem not in rhyme; it’s a poem in blank verse. It’s Frost not writing in rhyme. Listen to the “T” -- the dentals -- that end every phrase in that sentence:
“A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.”
And I don’t know if he did that deliberately, or more likely just because he was hot, but “A light he was to no one but himself where now he sat.”
CHARLES SIMIC: I think that’s a poem where every detail is so important. I mean, the way that the scene is sort of built and more is suggested than what’s there through these really fine little details, including, you know, what’s in those barrels? I mean, when he addresses the moon he’s in a different mood. I mean, what, did he have some hard cider there? He took a swig of something. I mean, the mood changes, right? Suddenly he says,
“Ah, I consign to the moon the snow on the roof.” What? Before that, he’s trembling with fear; he peeks into the dark windowpane and sees himself all alone and he’s scared.
ROBERT PINSKY: It would be something to shoot for, to write a poem that does that. Indirectly, one of his most ambitious poems -- his greatest one, as he says -- “Listen to someone who only has at heart your getting lost” – “who only has at heart your getting lost.” Not that he only has at heart in guiding you to a great future, not that he only has at heart reassure you, or only has at heart giving you spirit. He says he only has at heart your getting lost. So what else are we talking about?
CHARLES SIMIC: Let’s read another poem, okay? I’ll read something else. Since we’re on the subject of winter, I brought a bunch of things. I have some translations of mine, but I think I’ll read a poem by Denise Levertov. It’s a February poem, so we’re almost in February. And it’s called “February Evening in New York,” and I would imagine this would be probably later on in the month, just from what goes on in the poem, must be, you know, third week in February. But it’s called “February Evening in New York” by Denise Levertov.
As the stores close, a winter light
opens air to iris blue, glint of frost
through the smoke grains of mica, salt of the sidewalk.
As the buildings close, released autonomous
feet pattern the streets in hurry and
stroll; balloon heads drift and dive
above them; the bodies aren't really
there.
As the lights brighten, as the sky darkens, a woman
with crooked heels says to another woman
while they step along at a fair pace, "You
know, I'm telling you, what I love best is
life. I love life! Even if I ever get to be old
and wheezy--or limp! You know? Limping
along?--I'd still..." Out of hearing.
To the multiple disordered tones of gears
changing, a dance to the compass points, out,
four-way river. Prospect of sky wedged into
avenues, left at the ends of streets, west sky,
east sky: more life tonight! A range of open
time at winter's outskirts.
ROBERT PINSKY: Here’s another winter poem. This is a poem by William Carlos Williams that I always associate in my mind with Frost’s “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” I think Frost and Williams are much more similar in many ways than their reputations and the adherence of each one suggests. Very short poem by William Carlos Williams.
“To Waken An Old Lady”
OLD age is a flight of small
cheeping birds skimming
bare trees above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind--
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested,
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks
and the wind tempered
by a shrill
piping of plenty.
CHARLES SIMIC: It was his mother, his old English mother; she was English, yeah.
ROBERT PINSKY: “A shrill piping of plenty.” She looks up, she’s conscious again.
CHARLES SIMIC: Well, what do you think they have in common? They hated each other, by the way.
ROBERT PINSKY: Oh, absolutely.
CHARLES SIMIC: But what do they have in common?
ROBERT PINSKY: They’re great masters of ordinary speech that turns out to be very distinguished. So it sounds like you're just an American talking. “Old age is,” you know, and then it turns out to be so distinguished. And they both like to sneak in rather arcane or sophisticated vocabulary so you almost don’t notice it. They both are sneaky classicists. They both have -- without seeming to show off their learning -- they’re both very much not Eliot or Pound. They both very much don’t want to show you what they know, but they’re trying to be like Horace or Sappho without quite acknowledging it. So
I think they’re American artists in a similar way. And Williams is almost literally a European. His father was English. I think his mother was Puerto Rican. One grandmother was English.
CHARLES SIMIC: His father was English; she’s Puerto Rican, yeah.
ROBERT PINSKY: But the family was very much a continental and English family. And, you know, Frost going to England. They both were of a generation where you had to learn classical languages, but they were not in what you might call the Mandarin tradition of American poetry, which is when you show your learning and you associate with a certain social class. They both had a more, you can use the word democratic, idea of language and of art.
CHARLES SIMIC: Just to change the subject, let me ask you a question about when you were Poet Laureate: What surprised you the most?
ROBERT PINSKY: One thing I already said -- that the politicians turned out to be … Another thing that surprised me was the American and general fascination with titles. I had something in my upbringing or in me that always made me think you’re supposed to be skeptical about prizes, titles, awards. Read Mark Twain’s “Innocence Abroad” or read “Puddn’head Wilson,” and those amazing twins. I think I was really influenced by those books when I was young. So I thought you were always supposed to find things that were vaguely royalist or pompous like Poet Laureate (inaudible) … I had this innate skepticism, and I found myself often in situations where people were treating me awfully well because I had a title. And I felt this perverse urge to say, “You know, sometimes mediocrities get these titles.” And I was surprised in myself that resistance to it, and I was surprised by the cachet of it. And then I found myself in the Favorite Poem Project that Tom alluded to, in effect, shrugging and saying, “Well, this seems to have cachet. Use it.” And I’m very proud of the project.
Maybe you disagree with me. But to me -- I’ll put it in a slightly more inflammatory way, and I’m not just flattering my colleague here -- to me, of course, it’s a much greater thing to be Charles Simic than to be Poet Laureate. Otherwise he’s wasted his life. He wants to be the artist, Simic, who wrote those poems. It’s not like being a politician where the greatest thing might be you held a certain office -- you were mayor or you were governor.
It’s a bit different from that. And I think I was surprised that that was something I had to engage and deal with, and it had more power and presence than I anticipated.
CHARLES SIMIC: So when people expect you to, as a result, be able to do something [laughter] like …
ROBERT PINSKY: Rub your head and rub your tummy? [Laughter]
CHARLES SIMIC: Move the Rocky Mountains, you know? Well, what surprised me was the generosity of the people, how many people are really interested in poetry in this country. I mean, there’s this sort of view -- especially academics tend to sort of believe this -- but occasionally you read these sort of articles where somebody says, “American poetry is finished. Nobody reads American poetry anymore. There was a time, you know, 50 years ago, we had great poets like Frost and Eliot, and so forth. And before that, it was even better, you know? But, today, audiences for poetry are tiny, just you professors who teach and read each other.” And these kinds of articles are recycled every few years. This is completely untrue. I mean, it’s amazing how many people in this country who have some inclination to first of all write poetry … But, I mean, what you realize, and I realized this a long time ago but even more so now, there’s no school in the United
States, I mean, college and university, that doesn’t have a poetry reading series. It’s been going on for a long time, for decades, since the Beats.
So a lot of people go to readings. And you travel, and Robert knows this, you go to boonies, you know, remote places, I mean, out West, some school hundreds of miles away from everything, I mean, the kind of place where you ask them, “You know, what’s the closest big town here?” and they say Denver. And I said, “How far is Denver?” “Oh, it’s very close -- 600 miles.” [laughter] But the audiences are huge. How many magazines get published regionally? How many literary magazines are there in this country? It’s astonishing how many books get published, and how many people are genuinely interested in poetry. The only ones, I mean, who sort of propose that other argument -- you know, “Who reads poetry?” -- are journalists. I mean, journalists will say, “Isn’t it strange being a Poet Laureate in a country where nobody reads poetry?”
ROBERT PINSKY: I was reading one of these articles in Newsweek, and they asked me about it. They said, “It said in Newsweek that poetry died and nobody noticed.” I said, “Actually, I think it’s Newsweek that’s dying. Let’s have a race. Let’s see which dies first: news magazines or poetry?” And if you expanded that out of American poetry a little bit: Does anybody read poetry? Have you heard of a book called the Koran? It’s written entirely in poetry. That’s why people get it by heart and get big parts of it by heart. And a lot of the Bible used by Jews and Christians is poetry -- not by accident or because it’s archaic -- but because there’s a certain immediate appeal to this.
CHARLES SIMIC: Let’s read a poem, read a poem while I think of something.
ROBERT PINSKY: Every so often you sort of fall in love with something, and you fit it into every occasion. This is a translation by Gail Mazur of a poem by Michelangelo. Michelangelo was a serious poet, not just one who sort of occasionally wrote poems. He was a poet. And this poem in Italian is a double sonnet. And I like the poem on the subject of art and making works of art, and the poem also, to quote Kennedy, it undermines pieties and platitudes. This is Michelangelo as translated by Gail Mazur.
“Michelango: To Giovanni Da Pistoia when the author was painting the vault of the Sistine Chapel, 1509”
I've already grown a goiter from this torture, hunched
up here like a cat in Lombardy
(or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison).
My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's
pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy's. My brush, above me
all the time, dribbles paint so my face makes a fine
floor for droppings! My haunches are grinding into
my guts, my poor ass strains to work as a
counterweight, every gesture I make is blind and
aimless. My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's
all knotted from folding over itself.
I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.
Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts are
crazy, perfidious tripe: anyone shoots badly
through a crooked blowpipe.
My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.
[Laughter]
CHARLES SIMIC: The Sistine Chapel.
ROBERT PINSKY: He may have had in mind, “I’m a sculptor, not a painter.” But also, you know, that he was enjoying have a really good kvetch, because in part of his mind he knows, “I’m Michelangelo;” he knows he’s great. So he enjoys saying, “My ass is twisted, I have heartburn, I’m upside down, there’s paint on my floor.” There’s a kind of relish and exuberance to it as well.
CHARLES SIMIC: I’m going to read three very short poems that I translated some years back by a Serbian poet who’s no longer alive. He died in 1990, so I think in ’95. His first name is Alexander, last name, Ristovic. And he … For a long time he was a teacher, a grade school teacher in the boonies of Serbia, and then eventually got to
Belgrade and became an editor at a publishing house, a children’s book editor, and published a number of -- many books, actually -- of poetry. And when you talked about, you know, pieties and debunking and so forth, this came to mind. Very original poet in subject matter and in other ways, too. But he wrote a series of poems -- all together there are 10 -- about outhouses, which are, you know, still the way in which most people go to the bathroom in many of these countryside regions of the Balkans and so forth, unless they go al fresco. But outhouses are a main institution. So he wrote these short poems. They have a title and the first one -- this is the first one in the series – is called “Outhouse.”
ROBERT PINSKY: In just a moment, my colleague will read a poem about an outhouse. Please stand by. [Laughter]
CHARLES SIMIC: All right.
“Outhouse”
Through a crack on the right
you can see the red rooster,
And through the one on the left
with a bit of effort,
You can see the table, the white cover, and a bottle of wine.
Behind your back, if you turn, you’ll make out a sheep trying
to fly with their woolen wings.
And through the heartshaped hole in the door,
someone’s cheerful face watching your shit.”
[Laughter]
This is called “Monastic Outhouse.”
In the back of the nunnery there is a small
outhouse with a half-open door and
evening visitors. While one is inside,
another waits her turn with her nose in the
book. And while the first one exits,
straightening her robes, her face almost
radiant, the other one steps in, peeks into
the spotless hole, trembling with terror
that what lies at the bottom may leap into
her face and leave a mark on her flushed
check in the shape of a devil's cross.
This is the last poem, the next one is the last poem in this series called “Out in the open.”
While crossing a field, someone who in that instant is preoccupied
with thoughts of suicide is forced by nature’s call to delay the act.
And so finds himself enjoying some blades of grass from a squatting position,
as if seeing them for the first time from that close,
while his cheeks redden and he struggles to pull a sheet
of paper out of his pockets with his already composed
farewell note.
[Laughter]
ROBERT PINSKY: Charlie, say the name again. Where are they published?
CHARLES SIMIC: Where are they published? Well, they came out in a couple of books, one that’s long out of print. But the “Selected Poems” that I did for Faber in England, I think you can get it on Amazon. It’s called Devil’s Lunch.
ROBERT PINSKY: Say the name of the poet again.
CHARLES SIMIC: Alexander, which is just Alexander with an “x,” and Ristovic, R-IS-T-O-V-I-C. Devil’s Lunch came out about five, six years ago now in England.
ROBERT PINSKY: I have some translations of poems about shitting. Not really.
[Laughter] I was just saying that. I will read a translation I did of a poem by Constantine
Cavafy. It’s called “An Old Man.”
“An Old Man”
Back in the corner alone in the clatter and babble
an old man sits with his head bent over a table,
and his newspaper in front of him in the cafe.
Sour with old age, he ponders a dreary truth.
How little he enjoyed the years when he had youth, good looks, and strength, and clever things to say.
He knows he’s quite old now. He feels it. He sees it.
And yet the time when he was young seems, was it yesterday?
How quickly, how quickly it slipped away.
Now, he sees how discretion has betrayed him, and how
stupidly he let the liar persuade him with phrases.
‘Tomorrow. There’s plenty of time. Some day.’
He recalls the pull of impulses he suppressed, the joy he sacrificed.
Every chance he lost ridicules his brainless prudence a different way.
But all these thoughts and memories have made the old man dizzy.
He falls asleep, his head resting on the table, in the noisy cafe.
CHARLES SIMIC: Who translated? Oh, you did?
ROBERT PINSKY: You did.
CHARLES SIMIC: I didn’t recognize the translation.
ROBERT PINSKY: I had read about the rhyme scheme and I tried to get the rhymes going. To me, it is clearly the young man’s idea of old age. Cavafy -- a gay man who’s in the closet -- sees the old man. He thinks about the life he wants to have and how he’s afraid to have it. The old man is thinking about his lottery ticket or the waitress’ rear end or he’s thinking about his grandchildren. He’s not thinking, you can’t be an old man in this sense all day long. You’re thinking your things. But for Cavafy, I think it’s a very powerful poem, it’s a poem of projecting Cavafy’s anxieties on to the old man. It’s like a nature poem. It’s how you write about a horse or a landscape; you project your feelings on it.
CHARLES SIMIC: I love Cavafy, and that’s a very nice poem. You’re absolutely right: it’s a young man’s poem, you know, writing about an old man. At our age, you wouldn’t write it like that.
ROBERT PINSKY: No, no.
CHARLES SIMIC: Maybe we should read something of our own, huh? Let’s see, being in a library, I think I’m going to read a couple of poems that have to do with libraries. A poem called “Reading History.” And I was struck many years ago by the thought that there’s no appropriate place to really read history, because most history is bloody, nasty. I mean, pick up a history of ancient China, India, and you start reading, you know, you’re reading in bed, late at night, there’s a cat asleep on your chest, purring maybe. It doesn’t seem right. Other places, too, you feel kind of odd. I mean, horrors are happening from page to page, but if you go to ancient history, I used to adore reading Chinese history and Indian history, the way the numbers are rounded off, you know. Ping So-and-So singlehandedly cut off the heads of 4,000 generals, and 50,000 died, 100,000, 200,000 -- of course, the numbers are meaningless, because anytime they’re rounded off like that you know they’re just approximations, and so forth. But the library, too, is a funny place to be reading history. The poem explains it.
“Reading History”
At times reading here in the library,
I’m given glimpse of those condemned to death centuries ago (inaudible) executions.
I see each pale face before me, the way a judge pronouncing a sentence would, marveling at the thought that I do not exist yet.
With eyes closed, I can hear the evening birds. Soon they will be quiet, and the final night on earth will commence in the fullness of its sorrow.
How vast, dark and impenetrable are the early morning skies of those left to their deaths in a world from which I’m entirely absent?
But I can still watch someone slump back,
someone who is walking away from me,
with his hands tied, his gray head still on his shoulders,
Someone who, in what little remains of his life, knows in some vague way about me, and thinks of me as God, as Devil.
Why don’t you read one?
ROBERT PINSKY: My new book has a series of poems called “First Things to Hand,” and it’s as though I have to write a poem about the next thing I touch. And it’s a pen, a newspaper -- I don’t get out much. And this one is called “Book.”
“Book”
Its leaves flutter,
They thrive or whither.
Its outspread signatures like wings, Open to form the gutter. The pages riffling,
brush my fingertips with their edges, whispering erotic touch this hand knows from ages back. “What progress we have made.
They’re burning my books, not me, as once they would have done,” said Freud in 1933. A little later the laugh was on him, on the Jews, on his sisters.
Oh, people of the Book, wanderers, wonderous.
“When we have wandered all our ways,” said Walter Raleigh, “Time shuts up the story of our days.” Raleigh, beheaded, his life like a book. The sound: book, lips, then palate, outward-plosive to interior stop.
Book, book.
The beech tree, pale wood, incised with Germanic wounds. Enchanted wood. ... (inaudible) And characters between boards.
The readers’ dread of finishing a book, that loss of a world.
And also the reader’s dread of beginning a book, becoming hostage to a new world, to some spirit or spirits unknown. Look with thy mind cannot contain, you can commit to these waste blanks, the jacket ripped, the spine cracked.
Still it arouses me, torn, crippled God, like Loki the schemer,
as the Book of Lancelot aroused Paolo and Francesca, who cling together even in Hell, oh passionate, (inaudible) read.
Love that turns or torments or comforts me,
Love of the need of love, need for need, Columns of characters that sting sometimes deeper than any music or movie or picture, deeper sometimes than even one body touching another body.
And the passion to make a book. Passion of the writer, smelling glue and ink, sensuous.
The writer’s dread of making another tombstone, My market, orderly in its place, in the stacks. Or to infiltrate and inhabit another soul,
as a splinter of spirit, pressed between pages, like a wildflower, odorless, brittle.
[Applause]
CHARLES SIMIC: Nice. A poem that takes place in New Hampshire in one of the mill towns in New Hampshire, 1974 or thereabouts. The Vietnam War is still on. And it’s dedicated to Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon. And what got the poem going, I had read an article, an essay, in The Atlantic, which said -- it was a literary critic, historian, who was talking about (inaudible) and so forth. And he said, you know, we really can’t have any tragedies in our day. Nobody can write tragedies … and he went on listing the various reasons why tragedy would not work on the stage and then the other business about, well, there’s nobody around who is elevated, noble and so forth. You know, here we are, this is a war, and it really annoyed me. So this is kind of a revocation of that period which I think -- as I write about war -- it’s eternal, because the soul is curved toward nightfall.
“The weight of tragic events and everyone’s back
Just as tragedy in the proper Greek sense was
thought impossible to compose in our day. There
were scaffolds, makeshift stages, puny figures on t
hem, like small, indistinct animals caught in the
headlights crossing the roadway ahead.
In the great twilight, the weather unhesitating,
on the verge of a huge, starless autumn night.
One could have been in the back of an open truck,
hunkering, because of the speed and chill.
One could have been working with a sidelong glance
at the many troubling shapes the bare trees made,
like those about to shriek, but finding themselves unable to utter a word now.
One could have been in one of these dying mill towns
inside a small, dim grocery when the news broke.
One would have drawn near the radio with the one many months pregnant,
who serves there at that hour.
Was there a smell of (inaudible) blood in the air?
Or was it that other, much finer scent of fear,
the fear of approaching death one met on the empty street.
Monsters and movie posters, too, prominently displayed.
Then six factory girls, arm in arm, laughing, as if they’ve been drinking.
But to really at least one could have been one of them.
The one with her mouth painted bright red
who feels out of sorts for no reason, very pale,
and so, excusing herself, vanishes where it says ‘rooms for rent,’
and immediately goes to bed, fully dressed,
only to lie with eyes open, trembling despite the covers.
It’s just a bad chill, she keeps telling herself,
not having seen the papers which the landlord has the dog bring from the front porch.
The old man never learned to read well
and so reads on in that half-whisper and in that half-light, verging on the dark, about that day’s tragedies, which supposedly are not tragedies, in the absence of figures and doubt, with classic ability of soul.”
[Applause]
ROBERT PINSKY: In my mind, this is a poem about my experience of confusion and anger reading the newspaper. It’s the first poem in this new book, “Gulf Music.” It’s called “Poem of Disconnected Parts.” At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto Each one Teach one.
In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners
Address them always as “Profesor.”
Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I
Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.
Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination
That calls boiled sheep heads “Smileys.”
The first year at Guantánamo, Abdul Rahim Dost
Incised his Pashto poems into styrofoam cups.
“The Sangomo says in our Zulu culture we do not
Worship our ancestors: we consult them.”
Becky is abandoned in 1902 and Rose dies giving
Birth in 1924 and Sylvia falls in 1951.
Still falling still dying still abandoned in 2005
Still nothing finished among the descendants.
I support the War, says the comic, it’s just the Troops
I’m against: can’t stand those Young People.
Proud of the fallen, proud of her son the bomber.
Ashamed of the government. Skeptical.
After the Klansman was found Not Guilty one juror
Said she just couldn’t vote to convict a pastor.
Who do you write for? I write for dead people:
For Emily Dickinson, for my grandfather.
“The Ancestors say the problem with your Knees
Began in your Feet. It could move up your Back.”
But later the Americans gave Dost not only paper
And pen but books. Hemingway, Dickens.
Old Aegyptius said Whoever has called this Assembly,
For whatever reason—it is a good in itself.
O thirsty shades who regard the offering, O stained earth.
There are many fake Sangomos. This one is real.
Coloured prisoners got different meals and could wear
Long pants and underwear, Blacks got only shorts.
No he says he cannot regret the three years in prison:
Otherwise he would not have written those poems.
I have a small-town mind. Like the Greeks and Trojans.
Shame. Pride. Importance of looking bad or good.
Did he see anything like the prisoner on a leash? Yes,
In Afghanistan. In Guantánamo he was isolated.
Our enemies “disassemble” says the President.
Not that anyone at all couldn’t mis-speak.
The profesores created nicknames for torture devices:
The Airplane. The Frog. Burping the Baby.
Not that those who behead the helpless in the name
Of God or tradition don’t also write poetry.
Guilts, metaphors, traditions. Hunger strikes.
Culture the penalty. Culture the escape.
What could your children boast about you? What
Will your father say, down among the shades?
The Sangomo told Marvin, “You are crushed by some
Weight. Only your own Ancestors can help you.”
[Applause]
CHARLES SIMIC: Very good. I think we should have questions.
ROBERT PINSKY: Your turn now. Okay, here is a gentleman at the first microphone.
AUDIENCE: I really appreciate this evening. I have questions for both of you. It’s very interesting you brought up the poem “The Old Man,” because you wrote a poem in response to it. And my question to you is why did you write that poem? Was it a dialogical thing or was it just an accretion, a public response to it? And then my next question is to Charles Simic. You just wrote in the New York Review of Books a pretty amazing, I don’t know, it’s not really a memoir, but a discussion of what was going on in Yugoslavia and Serbia and all that, and I thought that was really tough and I wanted to know what kind of response you were getting?
CHARLES SIMIC: Well, I mean, responses? My friends liked it and some other people, too, but I also got responses which said, “You piece of shit, you scum! Betraying your own people saying all these awful things.” But I’m used to this. It’s something that I’ve written so much in the ‘90s when the war was going on, you know, in newspapers over there, opposition newspapers, and it always chews me up when I hear someone completely doesn’t grasp the point of it. I mean, anyway, so that’s pretty much it.
AUDIENCE: The follow-up, very quickly, what compelled you to write about this now?
CHARLES SIMIC: Because it was the whole issue of nationalism. The whole piece is about nationalism. It isn’t just what I’m describing there; it isn’t just Serbs. I mean, every nationalism is convinced that they’re unique. Our feelings for ourselves and what we believe and what we think are unique to us. Actually, it’s laughable, because they’re all copies of one another. There was a terrific movie that somebody made, a Bulgarian woman, made about four or five years ago. I never saw the movie, but I read about the movie; it was never shown in this country. There’s a song that everybody knows in the Balkans and in Greece, an old song, supposedly going back to 19th century. So what she did is she traveled; she went to Serbia, to Bosnia, to Albania, to Greece, to Bulgaria, to
Romania, a few other regions and so forth, and asked people, “Is this an Albanian song?” And they said, “What, are you nuts? Sure, it’s the oldest Albanian song. This is, you know, you can feel in this song the purity of our culture, of our heart.” Essentially, everybody said the same thing. Of course, she would mention, you know, “You know,
Greeks say it’s actually their song,” and they would go nuts, you know? “Listen to this song. How could Greeks possibly have the …” So I mean, just the sort of blindness, the narcissism of nationalism. So that was, you know, it was a fun piece. I enjoyed writing it.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, it was very dark. I enjoyed it, too.
ROBERT PINSKY: Let me try to relate your two questions to Charlie and to me and hark back to the clip we saw of that Kennedy speech. Modernism was a very, very big watershed. Visual artists, writers, poets, musicians, up to a certain point, expressed feelings like nationalism, flattering a ruler. There was a kind of confirmation or affirmation of a surface that was holding it together. And my impression of modernism
… And it’s striking that a speechwriter felt able to invoke the attitude of modernism, which is to say, “Maybe not.” And, “I don’t like platitudes.” And from being sort of a surface or a regime or a nationalism. Modernism, not always with noble politics … Many of the modernists were all fascists, Pound and Eliot were right-wing, certainly lots of people liked Mussolini, liked Stalin. It’s not that they had great, that they were models, but the spirit of modernism was the spirit of saying, “Maybe not.” To disassemble, to say,
“No, maybe not.” And that is very powerful. That is still with us, that kind of a dialectical ideal, and I think both the idea of a kind of knowing, ironic post-modernism and the idea of a kind of reactionary, chuckling, go back before, they’re doomed, both of them. They deprecate that. That’s still a very powerful idea in art. And you find a way to respond or to say, “Maybe not. The time is neither wrong nor right.” That’s why Frost -- for all of the conservatism of his form -- is in some sense a modernist. And the Frost we talked about at the beginning, that’s the modernist Frost.
And that, to me, remains an important aspect of culture, and possibly the kind of little kid who decides to be a poet rather than a performer, a rap artist, a singer, an actor, filmmaker. It’s the core of some resistant thing. It even says what the majority or what makes the most money in the culture, “maybe not.” So it may be I may be chauvinistic about poetry at this moment, but, in a way, poetry represents that modernist spirit in a rather focused, intense form.
AUDIENCE: So, what about the Cavafy?
ROBERT PINSKY: I don’t know what you’re talking about, because I can’t remember. You’re probably right. I can’t remember writing a poem responding to the Cavafy poem.
AUDIENCE: Really? It’s in one of your books.
ROBERT PINSKY: Yeah, I’m old myself, so it’s not fair to ask me to remember stuff that I wrote.
AUDIENCE: I’ve taught those two poems.
ROBERT PINSKY: Well, keep doing it, because I need you to do that.
AUDIENCE: I didn’t want to put you on the spot, but it’s just very interesting that you brought that poem up, and there is that response.
ROBERT PINSKY: I’ll confess to you that about a week ago, maybe two weeks ago, I found a poem I had written two years ago that I forgot I’d written. There’s a certain sense in which this comes out of weird parts of your mind, and, in fact, it was in a somewhat unpleasant voice, and I think I probably just thought the ‘audience’ Robert was not up to the ‘writer’ Robert. So I’m not affecting this. I’m sure you’re right. I’m glad you teach the poems, and I was trying to duck the question with that fancy thing about dialectic. [Laughter]
AUDIENCE: It’s very unusual that this is too tall for me. I can do you one better as far as the poems from two years ago. I told my friends that a friend of mine found two poems of mine from October 1996 in her folder at her home. Couldn’t believe that. Thank goodness she found them. I couldn’t believe, also, the start of this program. I could’ve planned it myself because I am on the board of the Robert Frost Foundation in Lawrence. I want everyone to please look at frostfoundation.org to see what we’re doing. We have a wonderful new book that will be coming out from Seamus Heaney. He came to our Frost festival in October 2002, and he has given us the copy of his speech that he gave us that day, and he’s also done some work on his critique of Frost poems. This is going to be a wonderful, wonderful new book.
I have to ask you one question, both of you, if you could, though. My favorite poem goes back a little further. Oh, by the way, Robert Frost passed away tomorrow in 1963. He was born on March 26th, 1874, and he died January 29th, 1963, just before President Kennedy did. My favorite poem is in your Poems to Read, page 9. I met you when I was writing, it was the last day, April 30th, 1999, Dr. Pinsky, and I was sitting below the Joseph Brodsky poster in your office when you walked through the door, and I was writing madly because it was the last day to get anything into you about Anne Dudley Bradstreet. And you walked through the door and I forgot what I was writing, totally forgot what I was writing. But I would like to have your comments. I feel that Anne Dudley Bradstreet, some of her poetry is absolutely beautiful …
ROBERT PINSKY: She’s also the first American poet.
AUDIENCE: I don’t believe she’s getting enough credit. Really, I don’t believe she is. So many schools are not teaching her, high schools and colleges.
ROBERT PINSKY: I’d put you and her in my book. Both Bradstreet and Frost embodied this principle of your otherness, your dream life. I’m thinking partly of Frost and Lawrence. You know, Frost was born (inaudible). I think it was nine or ten years he lived in San Francisco. Then at the age of nine or ten his father dies. So much to his mother’s humiliation, they’re dependent on the father-in-law, who’s got some kind of petty authority in the mills. He doesn’t live in the country. He’s not in the farmland. He lives in a mill town. But on vacation and some weekends, he gets to go to these other relatives, and he milks a cow, he picks blueberries and raspberries.
And for many of us, the imagination life, the dream life, is somewhere not where you see everyday. The great poets of the city may not live in the city, because you dream of the city. And I think it’s one of the things that makes her a live 18th century poet is that fact that she’s partly English and partly American. And that nostalgia and then criticizing nostalgia, the yearning for something other, but also knowing where you are, seems to be very productive for artists. Certainly, I think it was the making of Frost. He felt alienated from where he was, and he invented this other. As Charlie said, “Acquainted with the
Night” is one of the very few poems with streets and houses, which is what he grew up among, it’s what he knew.
AUDIENCE: The poem you wrote about the classic nobility of soul. Did you say you wrote that during the Vietnam War?
CHARLES SIMIC: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Because I remember reading that. I thought it was a much later volume of yours that you put it in. Was it the same?
CHARLES SIMIC: I forget what the original. Oh, it was in a book called Unending Blues. It was probably published later.
AUDIENCE: ’86.
CHARLES SIMIC: ’86, but it was written much earlier.
ROBERT PINSKY: So, he’s old, too.
AUDIENCE: You do very interesting things with time in your work. Was it Aristotle who said that the role of the poet is to make the particular universal? And there is nothing in that poem that suggests the Vietnam War. So would this be a statement about tragedy and war in general rather than about the Vietnam?
CHARLES SIMIC: Well, I think originally I had some more specific references, but I took them out to have this sort of, as you say, to have a kind of mood, an atmosphere of menace that comes in wartime. And I forget why they fell out. It’s one of those kinds of problems that, you know, I started, God knows, I mean, maybe mid-‘70s, whatever, maybe even earlier, and then for some reason, you know, it wasn’t working and this and that, and I forgot about it, put it aside, and returned to it, and it did not come out until much later. I mean, this happens with half the poems that appear in my books. Some of them are quite recent and others are poems that’ll take 20, 30 years.
I have a poem in a book that’s coming out next month. It’s called That Little Something, and it’s at the end of the book and is the title poem. It’s a poem of four stanzas, four lines each stanza, and I had it at two and a half stanzas forever. And I just, I didn’t know where the hell to take it. Not realizing that I had to live 20, 30 years to simply say the most obvious thing to conclude a poem. So that’s a very good point, but I never realize that that’s missing from that.
AUDIENCE: You never really know when you wrote a poem, I guess, when it comes out in ’96, it could’ve been written ’76?
CHARLES SIMIC: Right.
AUDIENCE: That’s very interesting. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: I just have a quick comment about New Hampshire. It just seems that we’re producing some really wonderful poets and writers, and it’s so exciting the amount of people who have had national recognition from New Hampshire. I’m wondering if it’s something in the water, but my other question is really more for both of you: What do you do when you’re the current Poet Laureate and you have certain political feelings and thoughts? And I don’t necessarily want to consider you George Bush’s Poet Laureate or anything like that, but what do you do in that instance, like that Guantanamo poem came about after you were Poet Laureate. I just wonder how you balance the politics of that, having the national voice in poetry? Thank you.
ROBERT PINSKY: I mean, I didn’t have to confront this. My three years were during the Clinton administration. In retrospect, it was a rather quiet period. One didn’t think of it that way necessarily, but I know at least one poet who declined the laureateship because Bush was president. I remember saying to this person, “You’re not appointed by the President, you don’t serve the President. Fine if you don’t want to do it. Write your poems instead, you know, stay home. But you’re not a national spokesperson. You do what you want to do.” I considered at the time saying to him, “You know, you could accept it and then resign strategically. Choose a good moment to say, ‘I quit, I can’t take this anymore.’” And it’s interesting that I felt squeamish about doing that. I didn’t want to suggest that. It’s a still evolving position, and, frankly, I sometimes think that I may be, though I’m glad that I did the Favorite Poem Project and all that, I feel like I created … I owe Bob Hass and Rita Dove and I for making the position more active; we created that question. And in the old days it was just an honor: Here’s some time to go to …
CHARLES SIMIC: Consultant to the Library of Congress.
ROBERT PINSKY: Yeah, write your poems, you’re a consultant to the Library of Congress. In a way, that was better. And I don’t, as I said to my friend -- this was not when you were appointed, it was before -- it shouldn’t have that much to do with politics and it shouldn’t be that …
CHARLES SIMIC: There’s nothing you do. I haven’t met a single politician. I mean, you don’t have to unless you want to. I have so many political poems against the war in this book coming next month. I mean, they’ll probably send me to Guantanamo, you know? You never stop for a second to worry about that. I say what I please.
AUDIENCE: Is there ever a time that you have to read a poem in a public place where the President might be there?
ROBERT PINSKY: You can choose. Again, I was real lucky. I think Charlie was there the night we had a poetry night at the White House. Rita Dove, Bob Hass and I, we had the thrill of reading Whitman and Dickinson and Robert Hayden in that room. And it was an audience of American poets, and we also had kids from the Duke Ellington School, and Clinton. In fact, Hillary Clinton read a poem by Howard Nemerov about poets called
“The Makers.” Clinton, then President, read “The Concord Hymn.” It was a different time. I think you would have a lot of trouble setting up an event like that at this moment.
AUDIENCE: (Inaudible question)
ROBERT PINSKY: You know, poetry is not, as Charlie said, poetry is not ill. A lot of things associated with the post are slightly embarrassed and silly. Poetry doesn’t need someone to sell it. Poetry is not … it doesn’t have to worry about being public or not.
Lots and lots and lots of people read it, buy books, all that, and it’s so fundamental. It’s like talking about dancing or singing. It’s absolutely natural. Kids trot around their Dr. Seuss. It’s too fundamental, it’s too essential, to need a lot of public (inaudible) about it, in my opinion.
AUDIENCE: Hello. Thank you so much for being here. The question I’m really eager to hear your answer to is, for young and practicing poets, other than just giving them the advice of, you know, just keep writing or write every day, what guidelines do you have, or what would you suggest?
CHARLES SIMIC: Don’t write every day. [laughter] What advice? Well, I mean, I’ll tell you, probably, you know, don’t listen to anybody who gives you advice. I remember when I was really young, this is 1957, and I was taking courses at the University of Chicago, and a friend of mine who was in the English department during the day, he knew I was writing, he said, “You should show your poems to Professor So-and-so,” who was a novelist, Richard Stern. And so he read them and he said to me, “You know, Mr. Simic” -- or whatever he called me -- he said, “You should read Frost, just Frost. Read Frost,” I don’t know, he said that for a year or two. That was his advice. I listened to him seriously, and then I walked out, and I said, “What an idiot?” I mean, I’m a city boy. I don’t want to read Robert Frost. What do I know about New England? So I’ve gotten lots of advice like that in life, and I’ve found that what happens is that you just have to, you know, somehow reject all these things and find your own way. And sometimes whatever people tell you can be very sensible and kind of useful, especially when they tell you to read so-and-so, and all that. But, in the end, nobody can tell you.
ROBERT PINSKY: Now, I’ll give you some good advice. I’ll paraphrase a wonderful Jewish joke about advice. It’s the guy whose chickens get sick. I won’t tell the whole joke, but he keeps going back to the Rabbi, and the Rabbi has different special prayers and things to do with a candle and a feather and you do this and that. And more and more chickens are dying each time. The Rabbi keeps giving more arcane Talmudic books and other things. And finally the guy comes and says, “Rabbi, all my chickens died.” And the Rabbi says, “Oh, what a shame, and we had so many more solutions.” [laughter]
But now I’ll give you some really good advice. Anybody who takes a writing course with me is required to type up with your own fingers or write out with your own hands an anthology, say 30 pages, 35 pages, that give an example of what you mean-- not Charlie or me -- when you say poem or poetry. Type, you learn by typing out. You type out that Emily Dickinson poem, and you think about the line endings, and you’re memorizing it five or six words at a time when you type it.
And remember at the beginning, I said to Charlie, “Here, read an ‘Old Man’s Winter Night,’” and I had my Williams and all that. This is mine. To paraphrase what I just said to you, you must read the way a cook eats. How is it done? Or read the way a young filmmaker looks at movies. The way a young guitar player listens to great guitar playing. And I can’t tell you your models, he can’t tell you your models, and they’ll change. If you type up something now -- you’re probably very young, you’re probably like 55 or something -- you type them up now and five years later, when you’re 60, you say, “How could I like that?” But you have a record of it. And it keeps growing.
CHARLES SIMIC: I’ve given that advice, too. That’s very good advice.
ROBERT PINSKY: See.
CHARLES SIMIC: He’s right. Especially Dickinson, I mean, although the punctuation drives you nuts.
ROBERT PINSKY: Memorize a little bit of it. And, for one thing, whoever you’re reading that intensely, you’re not going to imitate. So you think you write too much like Wallace Stevens or Sylvia Plath, immerse yourself in Plath and you won’t as you might do if you haven’t been reading them for years. Write a line or phrase of Wallace Stevens and you’ll say, “Oh, that’s pretty good.” You don’t realize it was Stevens. So immerse yourself in things you love and follow hints and try to find out where are the things, and type it out, write it out.
AUDIENCE: I will, thank you.
ROBERT PINSKY: The jokes are free.
END