The Act of Language; John Ciardi

We have no way of knowing what literary historians of the future will make of a large scale changes in American poetry which took place during the past 15 years. Much of the best poetry of the 1950s was beautifully made, highly personal, and obscure. When our speaker for this evening assumed the poetry editorship of the Saturday Review and also briefly the Nation magazine in 1956, there was much rejoicing across the country. John Charter was then among the most interesting, energetic, and accomplished of all the under poets in the country. He's always been known as not a popularizer but a strong advocate of high standards in poetry. His gospel of country and his craftsmanship of the poet's obligation to be self-critical and of full play for the conscious intelligence has I think never changed. Through these 15 years other important poets have arrived on the scene who shall we say sometimes put things differently and naturally and persuasively and no doubt misleadingly suggest that the differences might be of great importance.

All the while John Charter is flourished as our most public of poets and spokesman for poetry in magazines, in television, and constantly on the lecture platform. Good poets and good poetry continue to command his interest and he has I think a sound record for endorsing excellent work wherever he has found it. His heart for me to think of our poet, our speaker tonight, as a poet of an older generation. Yet his honors go back before World War II when he received a Red World Fellowship along with Udoro Welty and Carson McCullochers. He taught at Old Kansas City University in 1942 and 1946 with a tour of duty in the Army Air Force in between. He achieved recognition as a war poet. He was given a chair in poetry at Harvard where he taught from 1946 to 1953. From 1953 to 1961, he rose through the ranks to a full professor at Rutgers. From 1955 down to this year he's been director

of the Red Lothriders Conference. He has received at least six honorary doctoral degrees, as published at least 29 books, and from April 1961 to this year wrote the column a manner of speaking of the Saturday Review. He has recently been appointed poetry editor of the New England World magazine. His subject tonight, the act of language, is exactly in the committed mode of New England. All his public addresses and serious writings during the past 20 years or more. We're pleased and honored to welcome Mr. John Charney. Thank you ladies and gentlemen and thank you Professor Schneider, Professor Rue, Ed. I think I find it obligatory these days when I start to talk to point out that it is not necessary

for the poet to be beautiful. It's enough if the poem try to be. My topic tonight, which I'd like to illustrate with some poems, goes back to my feeling as an undergraduate and graduate student, and I have trouble separating it. When I was a student, practically all of the academic talk I heard about poetry was about its content or its relationship to trends or its references or its sources. I found myself fascinated by that sort of thing, but it wasn't really what I was interested in. I find myself thinking that aside from anything set or any relationship to anything else, a poem is an act of language. As for example, La Piazza is an act of marble and as a painting is an act of color on canvas as a dance is an act of the body and totally aside from anything, I'm not sure it's safe

to say totally, but substantially aside from anything being said, it is the performance of the poem which I'm interested. Students are forever looking for a definition of poetry and I must say I distrust their motives in looking for that definition because there are many things that cannot be defined. You give me a definition of life and I'll give you a definition of poetry. I don't think it's quite that neat and tidy. As I say, I distrust the motives of students who want a two sentence definition because I think they want the definition as something to memorize and recite in order to stop conversation whenever anyone says what is poetry. If you can then recite two memorized sentences, you never have to think about it again. I suggest that this is the idea of a great deal of public school education in the United States. Get a final categorical cup of a pigeonhole in which

to close the subject forever so that you never think about it again. The father of a friend of mine suggests the thought he had of definition of poetry. He said poetry is where every line begins with a capital letter. That isn't true. It only shows that he had read a limited amount of poetry and that he hadn't looked at the Latin poets or at E.E. Cummins, for example. But I think something useful might be pointed out about the act of language. If instead we look at the other end of the line, this won't do as a definition but it may serve to add some perception. Poetry is where every line comes to rest against a white space. That's quite different from prose. prose simply goes on in a long straight line but the convenience on the page we break it at the right hand margin and start it over again. And that white space has a great deal to do with the act or the performance

of language as a poet uses it because a white space is a punctuation. It's a punctuation not generally or not available, generally, to a prose writer. And it is part of what I think of as the notation of poetry. My premise here is that poetry carries with it as full a notation as does a musical score. You know some of that notation. It's periods, traumas, parentheses, dropped lines. A meter is part of that notation. Many other devices are. And in effect the good poet tells you which words he wants punched, where he wants the pauses and where he wants the slides. Let me give you one simple example before I move on to it. Some other aspects of what I think of as the performance. Ralph Hartskin has a poem about eaves. And it begins, I should explain it when he mentions bells and grass. He means blue bells, these little grass-like blossoms. Eaves with her basket was, that's

the end of the line you see. Eave with her basket was deep in the bells and grass, deep in the bells and grass, up to her knees. It's a lovely rhythm. If you wrote that as prose it would come out, Eave with her basket was deep in the bells and grass. It's a totally different rhythm. The notation has changed. Perhaps nothing different is being said in extents, huh? But nevertheless the whole rhythm and the whole maintenance of it has changed. And that is what I think of as the act of language in a poem as the performance of it. You see, by breaking the line at was, which is an unnatural place, you suspend the voice. It's like rubato in music. And since you have stolen a beat from one side and then paused for the end of the line, you tend to throw it a little more heavily on the first syllable of the next line. So you read Eave with her basket was deep in the bells and grass, deep

in the bells and grass, up to her knees. But no effect in aesthetics arises from a single cause. That has to be reinforced. To note, the first line starts Eave with her basket was, you start with a monosolabic foot. Then you have a whole pattern of monosolabic feet to reinforce the effect of this line end. As these things I don't hear discussed enough that seemed to me to be essentially the important ones to me when I am working the poem. Let me put it another way. When you get into paraphrasible content, are you sure what the poem is doing? I'm not sure what the paraphrasible content of many of my own poems are, but I'll give you a silly one. It's a silly example, but I hope I can draw some serious principles from it. It's a piece of light verse, and it began when I was trying to locate the

derivation of the word widget. I forget where I happen to isolate the word. It's a kind of duck, but it occurred to me that I did not know what kind of duck it was, and I didn't know what word it had been before it became the English word. It had obviously come from the French, which suggested that it had obviously come from a Latin, but what had it been before it became our word? I looked in a stupid book called a Collegiate International Dictionary, and it said origin uncertain. I already knew that, so I trust the room to my Oxford English Dictionary later and discovered that it came from Latin Bipio, meaning Heron, and had I known the word for Heron in Latin, I guess I could have guessed my way back to it. I simply never learned the Latin word for Heron, and the Peter J-Shift, the P-Shift and the V-Shift of the W could have been reconstructed, had I been smart enough.

That's one of the reasons for going to school. I nodded in that lecture, or I didn't get into that part of the dictionary, and you have to make that up later. But as I was looking in this original stupid dictionary, the definition it gave was any of various native deciduous wildfowl, waterfowl. That's a stupid definition, isn't it? And I was in some disgust, and I looked up the page and I saw the word Wikipedia, W-I-C-O-P-I, and that one was identified as any of various native deciduous, hardwood trees, including Tilly Aglabra. And that did me very little good. I speak very little Latin to trees, but I get stubborn about this sort of thing. My wife's cousin is a forester at the University of Missouri, and I've phoned him. I didn't have anything to locate Tilly Aglabra, where I said, Tilly Aglabra. And he said, oh, that's the levelwood or the bestwood tree. I sent

you a leaf sometime. He never did. But eight years later, in Northwestern Massachusetts, I got that tree located. It's a lovely tree, too, it grows in clusters. But at any rate, this is all irrelevance, but you never know which irrelevance is going to prove to be fruitful. I had a little rhythm going in my mind. A winging in a wikipedia. A winging in a wikipedia. The line wants to go to it. It's sort of airborne. And that's important, for example, if you have a poem beginning, do Bist-Vey-Ina Blumma, so hold and shun, don't whine. If Shaudeha and Vainbalt selects me, I'm helped. You know, do Bist-Vey-Ina Blumma that works? But you translate it, and you are like a flower, son. Not what has been lost. You've said it all, but something in German makes it work, and the same statement in English

doesn't work. Why? Why won't it translate? Maybe it's because of that little extra, do Bist-Vey-Ina Blumma. You are like a flower. You need a syllable in there. Maybe you are a fancy daisy. No, that's not kind of work. What I'm trying to suggest is the line is such a fragile entity. Robin Burns has, my love is like a red, red rose. And somehow that's effective. That's something you could say to your girl, and she might react. I don't think she'd react as powerfully if you said, my love is like a red rose. Why do you need two reds in there? I don't know, but the line you are like, my love is like a red, red rose works, and my love is like a red rose is not airborne. It won't move. The two come together in my line because I once found myself suggesting that the only way of translating to Bist-Vey-Ina Blumma into English is to say, my love is like a red, red rose. Nothing

is alike except the feeling. You see, the same, different elements come into the same conclusion, but they work as poetic lines. On a much lower level, I thought a winging in a wick-a-peer winging in a wick-a-peer was to go, you say. But now, you know that ducked out roost and trees, and I know that ducked out roost and trees, and I published a poem in the Saturday review saying, a winging in a wick-a-peer, 500 irate letter-writers would have popped in to say, stupid, whoever saw a duck in a tree. So the second line was protective, but it gives us an aesthetic principle. Never give the reader a chance to feel smarter than you are. And you may put that on a high level or a low one, but it's a sound and enduring aesthetic principle. Readers are just as insecure as writers, and give it a chance to feel superior, they will grab it. Read any book reviewer who is undisciplined, and if he has a chance

to upstage the book he is reviewing, he will do so. He will respond by how he would have written the book had he written it, because he is smarter than the author, he is the reader. So the second line was protective, you say. A winging in a wick-a-peer, in which no winging ought to be, is it? Now go ahead and write your stupid letter, I'm covered, you say. A winging in a wick-a-peer, in which no winging ought to be, a widowed winging roost. That's not exactly a complicated verse form, but I have one, and I'd like you to consider this proposition. Suddenly I find myself saddled with certain obligations that didn't exist a moment before, and that I did not have in mind a moment before. I'm trying to think of the form as a process of serendipity that arrives at a series of contracts that must be carefully observed.

For example, I don't see how I could continue this form without more illiteration. Now when did I pick up the contract to illiterate? A winging in a wick-a-peer, I don't have to illiterate, I could leave the two w's and go on, in which no winging ought to be, I think I might still be able to get away from it, but when I had a widowed winging was, then I cannot ignore the obligate. You cannot illiterate that much, and then stop illiterating. Now I could illiterate on some other sounds. There's no obligation that says I have to stay with the w, but here's an aesthetic principle. It's perhaps a bit more difficult to stay with the w's, and therefore the more demanding contract is the more satisfactory one. The same thing might be said of the rhyme scheme. I have AAB, and obviously I'm going to arrive

with the next one, CCB, picking up the short line, and I have a feeling this is not going to be a terribly long poem. If a poem begins, Armour, We're Room, Quay, Cun-O, you have a feeling that that's a marathon page, usually. You save yourself for a final kick when you have three quarters of a lap to go, but meanwhile you just settle down to a steady pace to eat up the clock. But when a poem begins, a winging and a wick of pay, it's going to be soon over. And therefore, let's say I guess it's going to be 12 lines. I could rhyme AAB, CCB, D-D-E-F-F-E, but it's neater in tighter if I rhyme AAB, CCB, D-D-B, E-E-B. And again, the more difficult contract is the more satisfying one. I decided that more

over, I cannot, I submit, finish this poem among other obligations until I explain how the widgeon got widowed. I didn't have to widow it. I didn't mean to widow it. I was looking for double-use, and the word widowed contains both a sounded and a silent w, which pleased my ear. Now, I could have said, a wistful widgeon was. And then my contract would abandon the show how this widgeon is wistful above the normal range of widgeon whistfulness. Or I could have said, a winsome widgeon was. I settled on widowed and rather like the sound, but now it is immoral, may I point out. To finish that poem without explaining the widowing of the widgeon, it's a cheat, it's a way of cheating. And you must not cheat. There are no outside motives for writing a poem. Nobody's going to bribe you to write a poem badly.

You'll do that without pay. The only possible motive for writing it is to write it as well as you can in whatever terms it presents. Well, I decided to stay with the w's partly because, another aesthetic principle, the word widgey up came to my mind. You like tonalities that match. Wiccafe is an Indian word. Wiccy up is an Indian word, therefore they chime together. That's one way of relating words by their origins. Since Wiccy up is a little frame of supple bows, usually willow wives, that can serve as a frame over which you throw a buffalo skin, if you happen to have a buffalo skin with you. And Indians did happen to have that sort of thing around, and it made a shelter for the night. Now, since I have a widgey up, I want to put some W Indians in it. At this point, I had to leave beauty

to go looking through a compendium. There are not many W Indians in the United States, and not I could run down, did me any good. And then it occurred to me after some time that Wichita had to be named for something. Now, it might have turned out to be the left handed buffalo in translation, or the place where two rivers made us, and I looked it up, and sure enough, among the Plains Indians, there wasn't tribe known as the Wichitas. And I love the Wichita Indian because he is the only W Indian whose plural rhymes with wars. And very few things in English do rhyme with wars. You see, so I solved two problems and gave me a second stanza. Pile in a willow wiki up, a Wichitas sat down to stop with other Wichitas. And now, all I really have to do is explain the widowing of the Wigin, and I've met my obligations. And the farm came out this way. A Wigin in a wikipedia in

which no Wigin ought to be, a widowed Wigin was. While in a willow wiki up, a Wichitas sat down to stop with other Wichitas, and what they whittled as they ate, included what had been of late a Wigin's wing. It was thus the Wigin in a wikipedia in which no Wigin ought to be a widowed Wigin was. You'll have now accurately identified the high water market of English poetry. Well, I rather know the high water market. But nevertheless, I hope you will take seriously the principles I have tried to illustrate in this frivolous form, because I think the principles are sound, and can be related very seriously to the act of language of farmers and its way of going. Let me shift to a more serious form to

see if it can't be illustrated on a different level. This is from a series of forms about Italy, and as many a form does, it tries to lie its way to the truth. One of the things that strikes you about the Italian countryside is the omnipresence of little, all ladies in black whose hands look like driftwood. There are certain age on your relatives begin to die off, and you go into morning for one, and you keep it off for the other. And after one, there isn't time to take off the morning. You just live in black. But I've had this subjective impression when I've poked into a little valley and found one of these ancient women that seemed to be made of black cloth and driftwood, that the Greeks had left her when they went home. They had settled these valleys, and when the malaria drove them out, she was the spirit of the place. She was the symbol of it. Nobody could know more

about this valley. The chances are she was born there and had never left it, and that every look she took was haunted by all of her life. And so I made up a name for her. And none, that means grandmother. I decided to call her, and none, the domainica, garnaro. I just like the sound of it. Sits in the sun on the step of her house in Calabria. Now somebody said to me, how did you like Calabria? And I said, I've never been there. They said, then you tell lies because you wrote a poem about being in Calabria. I said, well, what would you have me do? The Calabria is not there because I visited Calabria. Calabria is there because that's the syllabic count and the vowel and consonant quantity needed to chime with none, the domainica, garnaro. I could have said none, the domainica, garnaro sits in the sun on the step of her house in Puglia, but it wouldn't satisfy my ear. And I don't know whether there's any law to this or not, but I have to satisfy my ear. I'm not a poet

here. I'm a fake poet. I could have said Lazio or Campo Vasa or Abelino, places I have been, or Venetia or Reggio, something or other, but somehow Calabria had the right sound quantities to go with none, the domainica, garnaro. And she's sitting there. If this poem works it all, it's at the very end where she just looks out across her life and waits for the next thing to happen. And her hands are folded this way with the two thumbs together and a petal blows down from a tree and lies across both thumbs at once and she reacts. She looks down at it. It's a kind of Bauhaus poem on the premise that less is more. If it works it all and it's not my duty to tell you what works, it's yours to decide whether or not it does if you're sufficiently interested. I think that would have to be what makes it

work. And here's the poem. None, the domainica, garnaro, sits in the sun on the step of her house in Calabria. There are seven men and four women in the village who call her Mama, and they are in trees found in their blooms down all the hill and valley. No one can see more memory from this step than none the domainica. When she folds her hands in her lap, they fall together like two Christ's fallen from a driftwood shrine, all their feathers are twisted into them. There is that art in them that will not be carved but can only be waited for. These hands are not sad, no happy, no tired, no strong, they are simply complete. They lie still in her lap and she sits waiting quietly in the sun for

what will happen. As, for example, a petal may blow down on the wind and lie across both of her thumbs and she looked down at it. That works, it seems to me, it's because of the petal as the fresh image by juxtaposition. You don't have to say it on these withered hands and her reaction is simply to look. And since it's the terminal action of the form, you see, this is the kind of manipulation that a form seems to require. It isn't manipulation, it's a life commitment. Since that is the final action of the form, it's the important action. And since it's the least possible action, then the least possible action is somehow asserted to be an important action. But now, if that is indeed the case and I am, it's not up to me to argue as I say, there's one point I want to make. I could not have that

petal in the last line unless I had those orange trees in the first instance. See, the petals that enter a form have to come from what is already there. You can't bring a petal in from the world in the last line, it has to fall through the form under a thumbs. Now, this is aside from anything said, isn't it? But it's essentially and necessarily part of the act of language. It's the serendipity of the act, if you will. Check off, said it as well as anyone. He said, if you bring a canon on stage, fire it. But if you're reverse it, then, if you're going to fire a canon, make sure it's on stage. Now, if you're studying dramaturgy, you discover, let's say you're running a three-act play and toward the end of the third act you need to have a canon go off. It's not very good stagecraft to light the fuse in the wings and to run on stage and have it go boom as soon as it comes into view.

That somehow doesn't work. It angling nights the, it shatters the illusion. So you study something else called establishing the possibility. Since you know you're going to use it in act three, when the, when the army enters in act one, you have them bring some canons on and leave them in the public square. Now, once you've done this in the necessary act and formality of language, you will find that by the time you get to act three to use the canon for your original purpose, you will have used it for 17 other purposes that suggest themselves. That is that everything that enters in a form is thematically a possibility and invites an exfoliation. So for example, the hero may use it to show that he knows something about soldiering. Let's say one of the occupying soldiers in one of the girls in town begin to have a little love affair and they take to hiding love letters in the snout of the

canon. It becomes love's post office. There's a little irony in that that can be. Or let's say it's one of these old Napoleonic pieces that's, that's tipped up this way and the neighborhood children use it as a slide. And this becomes a tablo of innocence and death, doesn't it? All sorts of uses can be found for it by an inventive poet. That's again a way of going. I'm going to leave from I want to read a poem, many of you know, by Henry Reed, simply because it's a good example of the next thing I have in mind, a better one than I can find in my own poems, of constructing an act of language. It not if you construct it in this way or so, you plant things to use later. Or when you come to a resolution, you look at what you've already started. As T.S. Alley had had Queen Elizabeth say, in my beginning

was my end. And every poem has to be able to say that. This is a poem by Henry Reed, a poet who moved me enormously. I read this poem in an anthology and sent to England for all of his books. And after I'd read through all of these books, this was the only poem I wanted in them in the first place. That happens, but it's worth taking an excited chance on. It takes a little explanation, but not too much. When World War II struck, England was unprepared, they had to mobilize an army, and therefore they took squads of recruits and sent them out to country houses with a corporal or a sergeant who drilled them in the manual of arms and recited that mindless kind of wrote that passes for training in the army. And so it was that Henry Reed or the persona of this poem found himself in an English garden in the spring time with everything in full bloom. With one of his set of his senses, he's responding

to the spring. And with the rest, he's looking at this stupid sergeant reciting memorized things, and his mind plays from one to the other. I can't pretend to be a British sergeant, but let me read it as it might be with these American GIs. The first voice is of course the army, naming of parts. Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday we had daily cleaning, and tomorrow morning we shall have what to do after firing, but today, today we have naming of parts. Japonica glissons like Carl in all of the neighboring gardens, and today we have naming of parts. The second voice you see is, now when he repeats it doesn't it already enlarge the meaning. You see, when the sergeant first says we have naming of parts, he means literally.

Today we will recite, we will start to memorize the names of the parts of an enfield rifle. But when the poet repeats it by the end of the poem, it comes out meaning something more nearly today in our time. We are under the obligation of naming the parts of what it is to be a human being and stress. He just repeats the same phrase, and that's the marvelous act of language that takes a flat army phrase from its metallic context into its philosophical adoration. Aside from anything said again, it's the performance of the poem, but if this were a Baudville act, and if I were a Baudville agent, I would say I like the act, but your second turn has to be sharpened up. It's not as good as the ones who come before or after it, so if you agree. Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday we had daily cleaning, and tomorrow morning we shall have what to do after firing, but today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower slingswivel, and this is the upper slingswivel, which you shall say when you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel, which in your case you have not got. The branches hold in the gardens, the silent, eloquent gestures, which in our case we have not got. See, that works, doesn't it? Now, this is the safety catch, which is always released with an easy flick of the thumb, and please do not let me see anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy if you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms, a fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see any of them using their finger. See,

that's the bad turn. I don't think the trick of the echo worked quite so well that time, but then he saves it in what follows. And this, you can see, is the boat. The purpose of this is to open the bridge as you say. We can slide it rapidly backwards and forwards. We call this easing the spring. You know what he's going to do with that one, don't you? And that's a natural one, much better than not letting the blossoms be seen using their fingers. We call this easing the spring and rapidly backwards and forwards. The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers. They call it easing the spring. They call it easing the spring. It is perfectly easy. I don't like that, do you? The repetition of easing and easing. I wanted to sandpaper this poem. It's so good, I hate to see it mud. They call it easing the spring. It is perfectly easy if you have any strength in your thumb,

like the boat and the bridge and the cocking piece and the point of balance, which in our case, we have not got any almond blossom silent in all the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards for today. We have naming of parts. Now I think that's a superb way of turning language from flat statement to reverberating statement, but I still think the analogy to a vaudeville act would work. You save your best turn for the end, but then there should be a sequence in the actions. I like all the acts except that one of the all the steps in the act, except that one of the flowers using their fingers. That one seems a little bit forced to me. So that is very much a part of what the poet does. Robert Frost used to say with a chuckle

that he, when he was shown a new poem, he liked to look down the rhymes came to see who won. Now again, that has nothing to say about your content. More of them, most readers, oh by far most readers, seem to think that the dimension of the poem is determined by the dimension of the subjects. I submit to you that the size of a poem is better determined by the size of the talent that is performing that act of of language, that it's determined by the size of the mind that is doing the looking, not of the size of the thing looked at. If it were any other way, you say, every form about the grand old flag would be a grand old form. And I wish that were true. I'm afraid with no disrespect, whatever the flag intended, that most poems about the grand old flag are lousy little poems, full of lousy old clichés.

That it's hard to generate a new emotion about self-fixed and so large and important assembly. I sometimes have feelings about subdivisions of the flag, such as the officers under which I served in World War II, none of which filled me with patriotic rapture. But I have little exchange with a, I guess, a sweet woman at the Saudi regu, at least she wrote on blue paper with a large white monogram on it. And what she said at one point was, I suppose you rejected my poems because they were about God. Well, I didn't remember her poems. I suspect one of the reasons for rejecting them was that they were so highly forgettable. She remembered them, however, and this was her defense, you see, that every once in a while I write a smart Alec E. letter. And then by the time my secretary has it typed up and comes up a signature, I throw it in the waste basket. I'm satisfied, and I don't see any point in setting out smart Alec E. letters.

But I think my life, my letter was better than her poem. I remember the letter. I, I said, dear madam, no, I did not reject your poems because they were about God. I rejected them because I could not conquer a feeling that you were unequal to your subject matter. I hope she saw the point. To matter of fact, I've gone on to suggest, but then crossed it out in the dictation, bad. I suggest you try, you start by trying to get equal to say a grasshopper at working up from there. You say, taking a piece of the universe at a time, and maybe accumulating enough stats, if you're going to take the whole universe, make sure your name is downed. Now, I'm, I mentioned the army and some of my dissatisfactions with it. I couldn't, couldn't resist this one. My life was saved by the fact that I was literate. I was taken up my

truer and sent up to headquarters to be put in charge of awards and decorations because I guess that was the only man on a comeback truer who could spell. And I had taught school and published a book and put them in some magazines. And three missions later, the crew on which I had been serving blew up over Tokyo Bay while I was growing you know, adjectives at headquarters having been promoted. You see, as a subject for Japanese marksmanship, I was a staff sergeant. As a grinder of adjectives, I was a tech sergeant. I got promoted on the spot when I sent the headquarters. So you have to learn how to take the army. But there was, I, there's some confusion about my birth. One record says June 24th and the other says June 23rd. I was midwifed at home and therefore that might have been some delay in entering. And there was a colonel who bugged me all the time. I was on a side pan. I would come off a mission, glad to be alive again. And while

I was waiting for interrogation and trying to sneak another shot of the flight sergeant's whiskey, he'd say, now about your birth certificate. Well, my, my family was, I was glad I hadn't died that day and he was trying to get me born that day. And finally, I got a little insulin about it and I had to be protected by my pilot who threw some rank around. Finally, the colonel told him to get the hell out of there and submit it inform and he would buck it down and we did it taken care of. I didn't care when I was born. I was just glad that wasn't the day I'd died. But he was a daughter in Crosser of Tees and he wanted to know my birthday as if I remembered. I just had what evidence I've been told. But then combining my experiences at writer of citations and the natural tendency for dirty words, one of which I use here. And my love of the army, I can, I compose this citation on retirement, which in the rhythm is very much part of the, the act of it. I hope it works. Citation on retirement. Light-curned trinkets,

you there in the toe crud of God's clay feet, you ooze, slimy in the cellar in date is often a asylum, you loose button of bloody threads, numbering haircuts to a follicle, you parade breast battalion of Wasserman positives at close order bed check, zeroing in, de-married by de-married on a recoilless maximum velocity farting ranks, light stain, belted jelly leaking, amoeba, virus, phagocyte, amino, ferment, down porcelain filters to chemistries last edge of almost life. What's after you is back to building blocks. Space dust in the galaxy of an algous stomer in the universe of a shrimp's rectum. Cross over, I say, not drop dead, that takes follicle substance, but drain down one more hole wrapped in a hole back to exactly

identified nothing for the good of the service. I could have said I dislike you, but it was, it was, it was a better, seemed to be a better performance and more satisfying to go the long way round to it. This one is also a twitchy form, I hope it's twitchy. What do you do if you are a hero and you are all mounted and anointed for the quest, and King Arthur sent you out to find the grail and you've got your hammer on, but your back begins to itch and you can't reach it, you know, up in here and you say no, I have high purposes before me, I will not stop for this minor itch, but eventually you must. Have you ever had a thing in the lab where you have to rub against the doorway because you can't

reach it, and the more you rub, the less you can stop rubbing, and eventually you disappear into the lintel and become subject to the carpet as union. Well, this high-minded here, I sometimes feel myself to be in this situation, this high-minded hero tries to fight off this minor twitch and can't do it, and it becomes a kind of obvious amount of officers. He gets off, strips, rubs against the shag bark tree, and keeps rubbing until he has graded himself down to nothing, and is transformed into something that soars up into the tree, he goes into delirium as he keeps rubbing, and that's the end of high cause, I guess. A tick in the unreachable flat of the back goes the hero, it is madness to itch so small, he won't stop for it, riding, he rides at what he can't reach of himself, it will pass, but doesn't, it is cause, finally, must wait, dismounted, unbuckled, bare to the waist, a fair fool, he rubs against shag bark.

But it won't stop, he can't stop it, he scours on the rast, guesses he is bleeding, what rapture agony is, he dams his horse for nothing, for grazing easy and brutal, the trees are hot, great, he blackens like stakes stuck to it and can't pull off, skin and his orders shred, he learns pleasure that can't be ended. Ever, one lucid time later, he finds a girl from the village standing there, a basket-headed cow slut laughing, she dares to, it burns, he burns, he is sinking into the tree, a fire, a fire laughing, he can't do, dares to, damn her orders cause, a breeze slips from flags, he leaves, a sending, ascending, he leaves with it, up rushing, brims over and still rises,

his leaves quake, signal like heliographs, a sundance explodes, his horse bolts thunder, the slut jibbers to arms and knees under him, praying at the feet of his leaking red godhead and still rising, I think I got the idea for that scratching myself in a doorway. Again, as part of this process of trying to locate what starts them, I am a stone age mechanic. I do all of the things, I have a CS robot six horsepower, right around 12 horsepower, right around lower, and I have a manual, like the book of religious orders, that tells me what to do with it, and every fall I kneel before it, pray a book in hand, and I put this sacred oil here, and I open here, and I perform all the ritual, and then come spring, I get into my praying,

close again, and pick up the manual, and I annoying it here, and I prime here, and nothing ever happens. I have to send for its priest, and he comes from CS Robuck, and he's annoying it, and he does the right things, and now the thing works, and I conclude that my lawnmower is Catholic. If it were Protestant, we could work this out as a meeting of our own consciences, but this is a decreed lawnmower, it will answer only to anointed power, or else I'm not priest enough, but I didn't mean to get off on all this. My original notion was how stinkily noisy this thing is, and yet in the noise and stink, I have a couple of acres around my house. In a half day of the noise and stink, I can look back, and the lawn is all neat passages, and I think this lunacy leads to neatness, and I was trying to express its loudness, and I remember the one notion I was

playing with, was I want to say it sounded like the mating cry of the male bulldozer, but that there's a movie on that just down the hall. I passed the, but I didn't work out for me, and so the final line it has evolved was all summer in power, out roaring the bull fiend. Now a bull fiend has to be something loud, but fiend did me one end of the theological structure, doesn't it? If I have a fiend, I have to have a religious system. And without having meant it, let's turn it into a religious form. I should say it's called on the orthodoxy and creed of my power more. I say that very carefully because somebody wants to ask me about that poem about my paramour. It's two words both ending in OWER, power more. All summer in power, out roaring the bull fiend, it raves on my lawn, spewing into the dirty lung hung on its side. Myself maddened by

power, I ride the howl of hot new moan sacks full, the powder bursts of gnashed mull runs, till in one sweaty half day of the beast my lawn is lined to tidy passages. So neatness from lunacy, the orderliness of rage, bedlums eaten, all come. Now the dead beast washed in cool light and stalled, stalled as a cross of pun, isn't it? You put a beast in a in a stall and you stall a lawn mower and you want it to hop. But poetry has to be full of those puns, you seek them out. Unintentional ones are evil, but the ones you work for are a part of your performance. Again and again, all summer in power to touch in frenzies, it falls dry last, I kneel to the manual,

to the word touch, and pour extreme functions that the locked life waken when cold, and do call year after year in season to the lunacy of power, and am not answered. I probe prime pump, I beg your pardon, and but... I probe prime pump, and might as well pray to headless stone gods, nothing, nothing I know wakens the power blast hidden in it, which is no cause of Protestant conscience to be worked out between me and the source, but a priest held power of maintenance. Always at last defeated, I call, and its priest comes with cups, knowledge, and the anointed touch that does reach power in

mystery. The beast, gasps, shakes, wavers deepen itself, then roars full to resurrection, and here we come to cure green again, our triumph of faith, which is, of course, that even the powerless and inept may ride fit power once wakened by the anointed man believed in deeper than conscience and defeat. Whole in his knowledge given is touched, charged, the dangerous blind beast tame in service. That could be a reckless pawn, because I may be saying things about religion, I don't really feel, and yet I think I've felt them before religion got to them when somebody asked me why I'm not Catholic, I say, well, I was there before the Catholics arrived. I'm just reverting to type. Actually, my mother, for example, had a Catholic

book, vocabulary, but a complete set of pagan Greek responses, which she hid under this book, vocabulary. In some pagan sense, I mean all these Catholic things, but I don't know. Sometimes, I'm simply confused by what the world offers me. I want to reach you a poem about giving you something to say evil about me, because I hate the young. I don't really, but they're good candidates. If I can find the form, I thought I had it marked. Yes, it's called Encounter. I have one of those living next door to me. He speaks of himself as the essential conscience of mankind. How the devil can you carry on a conversation with the essential conscience of mankind? How do you qualify? If I knew how to do it, I'd like to be the essential conscience of mankind,

as called Encounter. You see, each poem tries to be its own tone and its own rhythm and its own measure of whichever situation it meets. We said my young radical neighbor, smashing my window, speak the essential conscience of mankind. If it comes to no worse, I said, I'll forget small breakage. But tell me, isn't smashing some fun for its own sake? We will not be dismissed as frivolous, he scowled, grabbing my crowbar and starting to climb to the roof. You are seriously taken, I said, raising my shotgun. Will you consider seriously that I was once a fair shot? Fascist, he sneered climbing down, or are you a liberal trying to fake me with no shells in that thing? I am a lamb at broken windows, a lion on roofs, I told him. You will have to get...

Thank you, Father. I did file that gun. I am a lamb at broken windows, a lion on roofs, I told him. You will have to guess what's loaded until you call what may be a bluff. Meanwhile, you are also my neighbor's son. If you don't mind helping me pick this glass up, I could squeeze some soup and a ham on rye from my tax structure and some coffee to wash it down while we sit and talk about my need of windows in yours to smash them. Not with a pseudo-fascist lump and liberal, he snarled, jumping the fence to his own yard. There's that about essential consciences. Given young legs, they have no trouble at fences. I don't really hate him, I'm trying to make peace with him.

I have become very seriously to write children's poems. I've been out of for a long time, but I always cut it myself by saying I was writing them for my children. Now my children are in a hurry to grow up and then are longer interested, and I'm not under the same compulsion to grow up in a hurry. I'm trying to stretch my childhood, and I have to confess I'm writing them because I love writing. I was saying earlier today that if my ghost were granted rewards and could come back and was offered a choice, would I like to find a seminar, a graduate seminar at KU discussing my poems, or would I rather find the kindergarten class having a hell of a good time with them? I would prefer the kindergarten class. There are a much better audience for poetry

than most of the upper classes I meet. But you see, I also am a parent with a lot of teenagers, three of them, which is a lot, and I have to get even with them at times. I went to the railroad station, I got on the wrong train. I used to live in Oregon, now I live in Maine. We're all entitled to one mistake, whatever else I do, I'll never be some mistake in that I come to live with you. It loves some steam. This one I rather enjoyed, every parent likes to tell his children how good he was when he was small or how bad he was as a case may be, and I thought I might as well. But again, as an act of lying, as does his work, I blow up the lie until it's so obvious that even the child knows I'm lying, and he's ready to say I'm ridiculous, but now the trick is to turn it on him, you see, and duck out of there before he knows he's

been had. That's the performance of the poem. When I was a boy, I was so good people from miles around would crowd into our neighborhood and wait without a sound from dawn to dark and half a night, and then again next day for a chance to watch me be polite, and perhaps to hear me say, please, and thank you, and how to do, and would you be so kind, and all how very good of you, and really I don't mind, and watch me serve the ladies tea and help them with their coats. Some people filled up two or three large notebooks full of notes on being good. One wrote a book on what he learned from me, so many came that at last I took the charging of modest fee, from dawn to dark and half the night, and then again next day a nickel to watch me be polite, a dime to hear me say, please, and thank you, and how to do, and would you be so kind,

and all how very good of you, and really I don't mind, in a year or two, and a day or two, I became a millionaire, and the best of that is of course you knew is that no one seems to care about your manners when you're rich, and the rich care even less, and that's my tale, the moral of which I should think even you might guess. I got into trouble with the children's fall, I was in Sarasota, and I read this one, on learning to adjust the things. Back to Bicabone of Burlington, used to be sheriff till he lost his gun, used to be a teacher till he lost his school, used to be the iceman till he lost his school, used to be a husband till he lost his wife, used to be alive till he lost his life, when he got the heaven box to said, the climate's very healthy, once he used to be in dead,

and I dedicated that last line to the city of Sarasota in Florida, it was not graciously received. But this is the tone I like to take with children. There was a man who lived in Perth, he had about $5 worth of boys and girls at $3 for a dollar. The less they were worth, the more they would holler, the more they would holler, the less they were worth, the two cents cash and send you to Perth. That's parental revenge. Let me close with one I've had fun with. You're entitled to have small dogs, but I have a big German shepherd, and I'm naturally entitled to be scornful of dogs this side. I was going ahead and love them, but don't let him come near my dog because he'll swallow them. Somehow I've always felt that it isn't really a dog, unless you're inclined to say surrogate to it. I don't mind people having spannules,

but it's not my kind of dog. I want an authoritative dog. I guess it's to keep my wife away from her. But in this imaginary sequence, Susie showed up with a dog, and this is my little conversation with her. Your dog, what dog? You mean it? That? I was about to leave a note, tend to a fish to warn my cat to watch for a mouse in an overcoat. So that's a dog. Is it any breed that anyone of a new or guest? Oh, a fleet area. Yes, indeed. Well, now I am impressed. I guess no robber will try your house or even cut through your yard. Not when he knows you have a mouse, I mean a dog like that on guard. You have to go. You'll find that you will have to write badly the rules require it. You can't leave anything out because when you come up to be examined

on your thesis, the committee will want to make sure you've touched all bases and covered all bases. And yet every writer knows that one of the first skills is knowing what to leave out, but you're not allowed to leave anything out. There are forces upon you in every way, but always it seems to me the act of writing mortally, whether it's for fun or for seriousness, is the fun of shaping the performance. Catherine Drinker-Bohenius to say, remember, biography must have a plot. History must have a plot too. History is not what happened. History is a style of writing and a series of premises. Event is what happened. History is a theory for selecting those events that somebody decides are important. Someone else might decide on a different set of events. History is a style of writing. Always taught a conclusion. It's a performance of certain

excerptions from the total and of shaping them toward a conclusion. It's not the thing said. It's the interpretable course in history. History does try to be literally accurate, but in poetry, any lie will do if it serves the truth. And no truth is good enough unless it's shaped to a performance that has an effect upon our emotions. Nice talking to everybody.