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The University of North Carolina presents listen America directed by John Clayton and produced by Johnny Lee for the University of North Carolina communications enter Irwin director to do this series we went to 13 of the top authors of this country and asked them if there was something they would like to say at this time to the radio audiences of America. We told them that of course there would be no censorship from the University of North Carolina that they could select any theme. It could be a big one or every day as they chose and they could write it up as they wanted to play a dialogue talk. One of these writers was Archibald MacLeish. Mr. MacLeish agreed to do this. The University of North Carolina presents to you now the American poet and leader Archibald MacLeish. I'm going to read some poems about America what I think America is and what from time to time in the past I thought it was. When a man follows this trait of mine his life is indeed in the most literal sense an open book. He's constantly
putting himself on paper and what he puts on paper is never twice the same because you're never twice the same. The changes of mind which will disappear in the length of life of another man the way it is disappearing along river don't disappear for him. And there they are in print. Only those poets who are able to maintain what is now fashionable to call a certain distance from their poems escape the exposure the distance for example of irony safety and derision as Yeats called it. The rest of us must confess having no choice but to confess that we've seen the world in different ways from year to year for like everyone else we are constantly engaged in trying to see it better. Each poem is a new beginning but no point counsels what went before. I'm over 60 but I'm still trying to see trying to see in poems what America really is. It has been different things to me over what I suppose I must call a long life time though it seems anything but long to me now. In the beginning America was land
land and whether I was born in Illinois under slow growing oaks with the lake Lake Michigan under the bluff to the east in the Great Swamp to the west and beyond that the prairie has seemed to me though I had seen no other a new land. Perhaps because my father was a Scot by birth. Perhaps because my mother though she belonged to a family which had been American from the first beginnings of the country was a New Englander A Connecticut woman to whom the West was always a little strange even so Eastern or west as Illinois. In any case whatever the reason America was land in the land was new to be learned about. This is an attempt to learn this is a poem called Cook County. The country figured in its winds. Re Ne Win was the wind off the lake blowing the pail side out like Aspen blowing the sound of the surf in and over the fences blowing for miles over a smell of the earth the lakes Malin the
southwest wind was thunder in afternoon. You saw the wind first in the Trumpet Vine and the Green went white with the sky and the weather the world in the barn and the doors slammed all together after the rain and the grass we used to gather when fall and cold white apples the West Wind was the August wind the wind over waste valleys over the waterless plains wears a skull as were a buffalo. Where in the sands of wild cattle the west wind blew day after day as the winds on the plains blow burning the grass turning the leaves brown filling with the brands of falling dark on the colorless water the lake where not waves were nor movement. The north wind was at night when no leaves in the house on the oaks own birds then the North Wind was over the whole sky and snow in the ways and snow on the sand where in summer the water
was. But sooner or later any American who thinks about his country very much thinks of it in other terms and those of earth and sun and wind and weather he thinks of it as a nation. Which means that he thinks of it not as the extension of himself in nature but as something different from himself other than himself. Not so much of physical reality as an idea an idea moreover which exists in other minds than his and and may exist there in terms he can accept. I began to think of America in this way in France during what we are coming to call the first war. And I thought of it in this way even more vividly when I went up into Belgium afterward to find my brother's grave. He had been an aviator one of the first Navy naval aviators who miraculously lasted almost a year on the front flying camel fighters and I had been shot down a few days before the armistice. His body lying in flooded ground undiscovered for months often. As you will see
there are two Americas in this poem that of the ambassador. And that of my brother. Memorial rain ambassador abuser the ambassador reminds him self in French felicitous tongue what these young men no longer lie here for in rows that once. And somewhere else where young. All night in Brussels the wind tugged at my door and I heard the wind at my door in the trees drunk thought. And to me who had never been before in that country it was a strange when blowing steadily stiffening the walls the floor the roof of my room. I had not slept for knowing he dad was a stranger in that land and felt beneath the earth and the winds blowing a tightening of roots and would not understand remembering Lake wins in Illinois that strange wind and I had felt his bones in the sand
listening. Reflects that these enjoy their country's gratitude that the proposed that peace no pain can break no hurt destroy that arrest. That sleep again the windrows there was a smell of rain and a heavy drag of wind in the hedges but not as the wind blows over fresh water when the waves lag foaming in the Willows huddle and it will rain. I felt him waiting indicates the flag which he say and isles in Flanders play in this little field. These happy happy dad have made America in the right grain the when coiled glistening darted fled dragging its heavy body had gone the wind coiled in the grass above his head waiting listening dedicates to them their bones of how this last gift a grateful country. The dry grass. The words are thick and their words sift
confused but the rasp of the wind with a thin grating of bands under the grass. The minute shift and tumble of dusty sand separating from the sand. The roots of the grass drained tighten the earth is rigid. Waits. He is waiting. And and all at once the rain the living scatter they run into houses the windows trampled under the rain shakes free again crumpled the rain gathers running in thin spurts of water that Ravel in the dry sand seeping in the sand under the grass roots seeping between cracked boards to the bones of a clenched hand. The earth relaxes loose and he is sleeping he rests. He is quiet. He sleeps in a Strange Land. There are still two Americas. For me when the war was over in the twenties and thirties followed. In a series of poems called
frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller said and written in a rage at the empire builders who exploited the continent and the poets who were deserted it and the Communists who talk nonsense about it. The New York Daily Worker goes a blowing over Arkansas. The New York Daily Worker goes a blowing over Arkansas and the grasses let it go along the Ozarks over Arkansas. In those frescoes there are two poems which put these two images. The first empire builders contrasts them the second landscape is a nude tries to recover the old innocence of eye which saw the continent empire builders. The museum attendant speaks. This is the making of America in five panels. This is Mr. Harriman making America. Mr. Harriman is buying the Union Pacific at 70 the Santa Fe is shining on his hair. And this is Commodore Vanderbilt making America Mr. Vanderbilt is eliminating the short interest in
Hudson observe the carving on the rocking chair. And this is J.P. Morgan making America the Tennessee Coal is behind to the left of the steel company those in braces he is wearing. And this is Mr. Mellon making America. Mr. Mellon is represented as a symbolical figure in aluminum strewing bank stocks on a burnished stair. This is the Bruce is the Barton making America. Mr. Barton is selling us doctors deliciousness down to Perth. This is he in beige with the canary. You were just beheld the makers making America this is the making of America in five panels. America lies to the west southwest of the switch. There is nothing to see of America but land. He would just beheld the makers making America. They screwed her scrawny and gone with their seven year panics. They brought her back on their mortgages old hoard cheap they fatten their buns at her breast still the thin blood ran from them.
Men have forgotten how clear and deep the stone down the gravel and grass grew when the land lay waiting for westward people. And this is the other side of the coin. Landscapers in New Delhi. She lies on her left side her flank goed and her hair is burned black with a strong sun. The scent of her hair is of rain in the dust on her shoulders. She has brown breasts and the mouth of no other country. She is beautiful here in the sun where she lies. She is not like the soft girls naked in vineyards nor the soft naked girls of the English islands where the rain comes in with the Earth on an east wind. Hers is the West Wind in the sunlight. The West Wind is the long clean wind of the continents. There when turning with there when descending steadily out of the evening
and following on. They win here where she lives is West the tree guy Ironwood cottonwood Hickory standing in great grove as they roll down the windows the see wood in the grasses of Illinois Indiana run with the plan of the win away from being on her knees there is no green lawn of the Florentines under her dusty knees. Is the corn stubble ballet as perfect with the flickering light of the corn. She lies on her left side her flank gold and her hair is burned black with the strong sun. The scent of her hair is of dust and of smoke on her shoulders. She has brown breasts and the mouth. No other country. But at the same time there was something else too something more than
these two Americas something which is haunted better and wiser man than I. The question of the underlying definition of that word. What was America after all if it was not merely boy nature or man in nature. What was the idea which called itself America and which Ambassador pews are. And the Patriot is had so betrayed. I struggled with that in a poem called American lottery and failed. This was a poem written at the beginning of the 30s when I come back from six years of France and when the contrast between my own country and the older and more homogeneous more centered life of Europe was shop in my mind. The point is to learn to read as a whole. But this passage will show you what I was trying to do and how short I fell. It is a strange thing to be an American.
Neither an old house it is with the air tasting of hunger. And the sun returning year after year to the same door and the churn making the same sound in the cool of the kitchen mother his son's wife and the place to sit mocked in the dusk by the worn stone at the well head. That nor the eye is like each other's eyes and the SCO shape to the same a fault in the hand sameness neither a place it is a blood name. America is Wes than the wind blowing America is a great work in the snow. Our way of white the rain falling now shining thing in the mind and the girls call America is neither a land nor a people are words shaped it is a win sweep. America is alone many together many of one mouth of one breath dressed as one and none brothers among them. Only that thought speech in the aped tongue.
America is alone and the gallows calling. None of those images you see discover what I needed to discover America is west in the wind blowing. But that is not all it is. The one thing that was certain and that point was the assertion that it is here that we must make peace and find a place for it is this land we love. But then what is it. What is this idea that pulls at us all and that takes the name of America. This promise to home is the promise offered and of what I put these questions to myself when the Nazis began to overrun the earth in the late thirties and the idea of America began to show more brilliantly against the gathering dark the poem was called America was promises. And here again the poem is far too long to read. I can read
parts of it only I can read the question I put perhaps best. Who is the Voyager in these lives. Who is the traveler in this journey. Deciphers the revolving Knight receives the signal from the light returning. America was promises to east where the dead kings in the remembered sepak West was the grass the grove the oaks already evening eastward are the nights where we have slept and we move on we move down with the first light we push forward. We descend from the past as a wandering people from Mt.. We cross into the day to be discovered. The dead are left with a for the dark of night laid under the cover lights. We mark the place with the shape of our teeth thing. The room is left as it was beloved. Who is the
traveler in these leaves these annual waters and beside the doors jungles them the rows the eaves heaping the Thunder up the morning's opening on like great valleys never till now approached the familiar trees far off distant with the future the hollyhocks beyond the afternoons and the butterflies over the ripening fruit on the balconies and old beautiful all before us. The answers I give are Jefferson's answer Adam's answer Tom Paine's answer and they add up to no answer no answer to me. Now as years of the second war the war in years in which a man could think about these things not at least in Washington where I spent them. But history has a way of providing answers of his own and ideas are more often defined by their opposites than by their shadows as the war was fought and won and the decade which followed began its unhappy course.
Certain things that had been dark were dark no longer. One learned at least what America was not. It was not what the frightened thought it was. Those who were so terrified of the Russians that they thought America was nothing but a war to keep them out. I felt sure enough of that in 1947 to write a poem I called Brave New World. But you Thomas Jefferson. You could not lie so still you could not bear the weight of stone on the quiet Hill. You could not keep your green grown piece nor hold your forwarded hand if you could see your sweet land. And there was a time Tom Jefferson when freedom made free men. The new found Earth from the new freed mind were brothers then there was a time when
tyrants feared the new world of the free. Freedom is afraid. Shrieks that Karen words have not changed their sense nor tyranny grown knew the truth as you have. Jefferson will still hold true. What's changed is freedom in this age. What great men to choose small men neither win nor lose freedom when men fear freedom's use but love its useful name as cause and cause enough for fear and cause for shame. We fought a war in freedom's name and won it in our own. We fought to free our world and raise a wall of stone. Your countryman who could have built the hill fires of the free to set the dry world blaze with liberty to burn the brutal thorn in
Spain of bigotry and hate and the death of the brittle weed beyond the plate. Who could have heaped the bloodiest the dung of time to light the Danube in a sudden flame of hope. By night your countryman who could have hurled their freedom like a brand have cupped it to a candle spark in a frightened hand. Freedom that was a thing to you as they made a thing to save and staked it in and fenced it round like a dead man's grave. Thomas Jefferson. You could not lie so still you could not bear the weight of stone on your green hill. You could not hold your angry tongue if you could see a better world and the new world. And there was something else America was not. It was not a wall and
neither was it a drum to be beaten for a mob to march to. We came in that same decade. To know the America of the Patriot ears came near enough almost to see it. And what we saw sickened the blood. Whatever else America might be it was not that nightmare a country of frenzy and fear and falshood in which a flagstaff was a club to beat the decent into silence. We never saw that America with our eyes thank God because the drum was broken by an honest man in time. But we came near enough to see it in our minds and we remember we had been as close to spiritual death as we ever want to be. I tried to look at that sick world in a poem written during those sick years and called Schickel fools. Ship of Fools show down this
beach by the Ad Age grounded if you want spectacles we are a spectacle a living lot. The generation poking around in pools on the mud flap kicking at clams cokes condoms dead fish minute Danimal killa air cocktails along with drawing gurgle out of a ketchup bottle sucked by the descending silt where other fountains of the deep the fountains where other springs of the sea do enter them. The ship fast and the fools everywhere. Fools up in the muck to the eastward waiting for history to applaud on the date set by the central price idiom. A tide in the affairs of men fixed by the waterworks of fraudulent season of the sea. It was off to the west and the place opposite damning the possibility of Tides screaming there are no tides in this ocean pulling the past in shallow
footprints impounding the brine for when the ship passed the House careened the planks warped by the sun. The beautiful curve of the stern in the cake. And the minnow one proud by roosting birds. Four thousand years of that sea wandering brought to this stalled stinking of sulphur gas out of guts and not much like voices blathering slanders in the house of state and the obscene birds the black indecent dribbling obscene birds their mouths filled with excrement shrieking fouling the figure of the proud. The springs of the sea god where things where she dies be washed with salt the years with salt the tongues wash with the sea salt on what tide rising to what fresh wind What cries of
morning Siegel's Shila ship stirring her stench. And live and on the sea and the cleansing water leading to her course where the fountains. But these years were after all only the shadows passing shadows. What America is what America is is in part what America is not but what America is not is only part of the definition I've been looking for all my life. The definition of the American idea the idea of the republic. I suppose I should go looking for it as long as I live and write. But one thing I'm now sure that I know in which direction it will be found. Not in the continent itself the earth though the continent is part of it. Not in the nation and though the nation too was part. Not even in
the ideal the abstraction but in men's lives in the lives of those Americans who have lived the American tradition and so recreated it. But the idea of America is an idea of human integrity set in a rich land with the greatest of Will men's dreams to live by the dream of a whole and generous freedom. In a poem called ACT 5 in a passage in that poem. I attempted to put down the death of a president of the Republic who had lived in that tradition and died in it. He would have been the last to say that the answer was there in his life. But it is in this direction in the lives and deaths of a man here and a man there a woman who in the great phrase about beans with served human liberty. It is here in this direction in the lives lived for human liberty that the answer will be found
in my poem the fragment of it. I want to read and close with is this. The responsible man death's hand upon his shoulder knowing well the liars may prevail and calumny bring all his days to nothing. Knowing truth has often been betrayed by time that keeps it as the crux paints water. Knowing nothing suffered or endured will change by one word. But the worst will say what those who listen to the worst believe the responsible teeth bad sleep difficult tired tired tired to the heart carries the day to the next day to the next and does what must be done dies in his chair fagged out worn down sick with the weight of his own bones.
The task finished. The war won the victory assured the glory left behind him for the others and the wheels rolled up through the night in the sweet land in the cool in the spring. In between the lanterns. For the past half hour you've been listening to Archibald MacLeish the series is listening America directed by John Clayton and produced by Johnny Lee for the University of North Carolina communication center. Irwin director this series is produced on a grant in aid from the National Association of educational broadcasters made possible by the Educational Television and Radio Center. On each program of the current series one of the best of our American writers will present his views on the theme of his choice either dramatized or more directly as he chooses. Listen America is recorded in the studios of the department of radio television and motion pictures on the campus at Chapel Hill.
This is the end E.B. Radio Network.
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Series
Listen America
Episode
Archibald MacLeish
Producing Organization
University of North Carolina
Contributing Organization
University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/500-2r3p0m2v
If you have more information about this item than what is given here, or if you have concerns about this record, we want to know! Contact us, indicating the AAPB ID (cpb-aacip/500-2r3p0m2v).
Description
Episode Description
Archibald MacLeish reads poems about what he thinks America is and was.
Series Description
A series of 13 programs featuring the works of selected contemporary American authors.
Broadcast Date
1956-09-04
Topics
Literature
Media type
Sound
Duration
00:28:17
Credits
Director: Clayton, John S.
Producer: Ehle, John, 1925-
Producing Organization: University of North Carolina
Speaker: MacLeish, Archibald, 1892-1982
Speaker: Kuralt, Charles, 1934-1997
AAPB Contributor Holdings
University of Maryland
Identifier: 56-50-7 (National Association of Educational Broadcasters)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Duration: 00:28:12
If you have a copy of this asset and would like us to add it to our catalog, please contact us.
Citations
Chicago: “Listen America; Archibald MacLeish,” 1956-09-04, University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 28, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-2r3p0m2v.
MLA: “Listen America; Archibald MacLeish.” 1956-09-04. University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 28, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-2r3p0m2v>.
APA: Listen America; Archibald MacLeish. Boston, MA: University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-2r3p0m2v