20101209-14092-Galway Kinnell.mp3

Event Introduction and Acknowledgements

00:00:00

Introduction of Gallway Canal by Marie Howe

00:02:15

Gallway Canal's Poetry Reading

00:09:11

Reflections and Closing by Gallway Canal

00:45:37

00:00:02

BERNARD SCHWARTZ

Good evening, everyone. I'm Bernard Schwartz, the Director of the Unterberg Poetry Center, and it's my privilege to welcome you to tonight's reading. Gallway Kinnell, first read at the Poetry Center in 1959, and it's our great honor to host him once again. He'll be introduced by Marie Howe. On behalf of the Poetry Center, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Greenwood family, the National Endowment for the Arts, Eva Usdan, Joan and Jack Jacobson, the Kaplan Foundation, Time Warner Cable, in partnership with Ovation TV, the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development, and the New York State Council on the Arts. I'd also like to say thank you to Poets and Writers Magazine for its support of tonight's reading.

00:00:48

BERNARD SCHWARTZ

Before we begin, I wanted to mention some of our other upcoming poetry events. These include readings by C.D. Wright, C.K. Williams, Rosanna Warren, Bei Dao, and Alice Notley, as well as special events including a celebration of Czeslaw Milosz with Adam Zagajewski and Robert Hass, and a brunch time conversation on translation with Edith Grossman and Clare Kavanagh. The next event in our reading series will take place on Monday, December 13th, when Ian Frazier and John McPhee will read from their work. Following tonight's reading, we invite you all to a book signing in the lounge located through the doors at the back of the hall. Copies of Mr. Connell's work will be available for purchase at that time, courtesy of Barnes and Noble.

00:01:39

BERNARD SCHWARTZ

Marie Howe's books of poetry are "The Good Thief," which was selected for the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood, "What the Living Do," and "The Kingdom of Ordinary Time." She is the co-editor of a book of essays, "In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the Aids Pandemic," and she teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence. Please welcome Marie Howe as she introduces Gallway Kinnell. (applause)

00:02:15

MARIE HOWE

Hi, everybody. It's great to be here. It's a great -- can you hear me? Who said that? Did someone say louder? Now can you hear me? Yes. Let's have a little call and answer. Warm up the room a little bit. Well, I'm. I'm so moved to be here. To be here to celebrate Galway and to hear him in a few minutes. In 1959, Galway, I was nine years old when you gave your first reading here which makes me feel young, which is nice. But I was thinking earlier about when I was teaching at Tufts University, my first college teaching job. I remember exactly the chair I was in when I read "Freedom, New Hampshire" for the first time. And I remember reading through those sections and coming to the end and just putting my head down on the desk, you know, and having one of those moments of recognition that when when one doesn't feel alone, you know.

00:03:28

MARIE HOWE

Gallway Canal is in the house, and no one needs to be afraid because he is a gentle man and he is kind. I say this because speaking here at the 92nd Street Y always makes me a little nervous. Galway is in the house and he is about to read to us and this is why we're here. We have come together as around a great hearth around the fire that his poems will make for us. We've come through this cold night, each of us, from where we live or where we work, we've put on our coats. Some of us have put on our long underwear. Bernard might be wearing long underwear (laughter) to hear him. And we know, and this is the great relief that for these next moments, we will not be ashamed of having a body because Galway, like Merlin, always brings the earth in with him, even into halls as lovely and proper as this. The muck and the snot and the blood and the lumps of shit and straw. Let no one be afraid to sneeze or to unwrap candy. (laughter) We might, if only for this little while tonight love our arms and our bellies, our own sweat and juices, our secret hairs and pimples. (laughter)

00:05:10

MARIE HOWE

We might like the taste of our own mouths and those of these kids that were out there, that's you guys, isn't it? Is that you? The ones we were talking to earlier? You like that? Liking our pimples. We might even love the snorts we make in our sleep. For he has taught us to love the pig and the bear and the porcupine and the ant and in doing so, he has retaught us our own loveliness. The poet is in the house, and for these next minutes we are bound to feel joy because we are alive and not dead. We know that one day we will be dead, but we are not dead tonight. And we will remember those who were alive with us and are now apparently gone. They live with us in the community of our collective remembering. The poet Galway Kinnell is in the house and he remembers them. He remembers who said what to whom, and then what happened and then and how five years later, that and then, well, you know what happened after that.

00:06:34

MARIE HOWE

It was just there by the bend in the road where someone came along the curve too fast on ice and touched the brake and sailed into the pasture and there where the frogs sing at dusk there where we bought the speckled eggs. Galway is here, and he understands the circular nature of time, how the past can overtake us as we walk along a sidewalk. Bleecker Street, a winter night. Snow falling. How the future can turn around to look at us with that smile that no one understands. The tree limbs creaked. Someone milked a cow. The milk squawking into the pail. We all ate the cooling oatmeal. Some of us liked it. Some of us didn't. The piglet escaped through the hole it had made in the fence. Is this the kingdom of heaven? Scritch. Scritch. The sound of someone's pen on paper. Mortal acts. Mortal words. Who is that boy in the other room? What on earth is he doing? It's young Galway. He's writing. It was then. So long ago. Oh, what a kingdom it was! And now it's now again, December 9th, 2010. Galway Kinnell, the poet, the poetry writer is in the house and he is about to read to us. What a kingdom it is. Let's welcome him. (applause)

00:09:11

GALWAY KINNELL

Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here. I learned that this is the 35th time I have read in this auditorium and this is the 35th time itself. And I'm very happy about this and that's why I think I feel contented standing here in front of all of you. Most of you I can't see, of course. So I'm going to read some poems. The first one is "Everyone was in Love." One day, when they were little, Maud and Fergus appeared in the doorway, naked and mirthful, with a dozen long garter snakes draped over each of them like brand new clothes. Snake tails dangled down their backs, and snake foreparts in various lengths fell over their fronts with heads raised and swaying alert as cobras. The snakes writhed their dry skins upon each other as snakes like doing in lovemaking with the added novelty of caressing soft, smooth, moist human skin.

00:10:57

GALWAY KINNELL

Maud and Fergus were deliciously pleased with themselves. The snakes seemed to be tickled, too. We were enchanted. Everyone was in love. Then Maude drew off Fergus shoulder as off a tie rack, a peculiarly lumpy snake, and told me to look inside. Inside the double hinged jaw. A frog's green, webbed hind feet were being drawn like a diver's, very slowly, as if into deepest waters. Perhaps thinking I might be considering rescue, Maude said,"Don't. Frog is already elsewhere."

00:11:53

GALWAY KINNELL

Can you hear me okay? Is there anyone who can't hear me okay? Good. At the end of this next poem, you will probably hear an echo of the lines from William Carlos Williams poem "Asphodel, Asphodel, that Greeny Flower." It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. That little passage from William Carlos Williams plays a role at the end of this poem called "It All Comes Back." Fergus had his fourth birthday. We had a party. Now, that wasn't part of the poem. The poem begins we replaced the cake with its four unlit candles, poked into thick frosting on the seat of his chair at the head of the table for just a moment, while Inez and I unfolded and spread Spanish cloth over Vermont maple. Suddenly, he left the group of family, family friends, kindergarten mates and darted to the table and just as someone cried, no, no, don't sit, he sat down right on top of his cake and the room broke into groans and guffaws. Actually, it was pretty funny. All of us were yelping our heads off. And actually it wasn't in the least funny. He ran to me and I picked him up, but I was still laughing and in indignant fury, he hooked his thumbs into the corners of my mouth, grasped my cheeks and yanked. He was so muscled and so outraged I felt he might rip my whole face off. Then I realized that was exactly what he was trying to do, and it came to me. I was one of his keepers. His birth and the birth of his sister had put me on earth a second time with the duty, this time to protect them and to help them to love themselves.

00:14:34

GALWAY KINNELL

And yet here I was, locked in solidarity with a bunch of adults against my own child, he-hawing away. All of us, without asking if underneath we weren't striking back too late at our own parents for their humiliations of us. I gulped down my laughter and held him and apologized and commiserated and explained. And then things were set right again. But to this day it remains loose on its face, seat of superior smiles on the bones from that hard yanking. Shall I publish this story from long ago and risk embarrassing him? I like it that he fought back. But what's the good? Now he's 36 and telling the tale of that mortification when he was four. Let him decide. Here are the three choices. He can scratch his slapdash cheek mark -- sorry. He can scratch his slapdash -- hmmm, check mark which? Which makes me think of the rakish hook of his old high school hockey stick in whichever box supplies. Tear it up. Don't publish it, but give me a copy. Okay. Publish it on the chance that somewhere someone survives of all those said to die miserably every day, for lack of the small clarifications sometimes found in poems.

00:16:32

GALWAY KINNELL

I was at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, when, as most of you know, where as most of you know, you're given a wonderful cabin in the woods to work, and your lunch is brought, brought to you every day. You're expected to eat with all the others breakfast and supper, but in order to get more work done, your lunch is delivered to your cabin. And I wanted to get a lot of work done. And so I actually moved my cabin into the -- moved my moved entirely into my cabin. All the things I needed from the room I was given and there I cooked Irish oatmeal overnight on the heat register. And one day a a painter said to me, "Galway, how come we never see you at breakfast?" I told him I ate oatmeal in my cabin, and he reared back as if in alarm and said, "Alone?" I don't know what he meant with his question, and if he left the McDowell at a few days later. So I never found out. But I gave it a lot of thought, and a few days later I wrote "Oatmeal." I eat oatmeal for breakfast. I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it. I eat it alone. I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone. Its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you. That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with. Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion. Nevertheless, yesterday morning I ate my oatmeal porridge, as he called it, with John Keats. Keats said that due to its glutinous texture, gluey glueish lumpiness, hint of slime, and unusual willingness to disintegrate, oatmeal must never be eaten alone. He said it's perfectly okay to eat it with an imaginary companion, and he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John Milton. (laughter)

00:19:24

GALWAY KINNELL

He also told me about writing the "Ode to a Nightingale." He had a heck of a time finishing it. Those words were [its only adequate poem?] He said, more or less speaking through his porridge. He wrote it quickly, he said, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his pocket. But when he got home, he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas, and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they made some sense of them but he isn't sure to this day if they got it right. He still wonders about the occasional drift, sense of drift between stanzas and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, then lay itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move forward with God's reckless wobble. He said someone told him that later in life, Wordsworth heard about the scraps of paper and tried shuffling some stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse. (laughter) When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autem." He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words lovingly and desired accent sounded sweet. He didn't offer the story of writing the poem. I doubted there is much of one. But he did say the sight of a just harvested oatfield got him started, and two of the lines for summer has all brimmed their clammy cells and the watchist, the last oozings hours by hours came to him while eating oatmeal alone. (laughter)

00:21:19

GALWAY KINNELL

I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering furrows, muttering, and it occurs to me, maybe there is no sublime, only the shining of the amneon tatters. For supper tonight I'm going to have a baked potato left over from lunch. I'm aware that a leftover baked potato can be damp, slippery, and simultaneously gummy and crumbly and therefore, I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me. (laughter)

00:22:11

GALWAY KINNELL

Now, this is a this is a rather long poem, and it has seven parts and it's called "Gravity." And I'll just pause between each of the seven parts. Upon the star Cygnus X, which wobbles as if being boffed by a hidden companion upon facial flesh, determined to become a double chin, upon a silk stocking the color of bees delicately rolling itself up down a leg. Upon the slack air in the lecture hall after the hand signer has turmoiled it. For upon the tongue, which has somehow paddled its way into the lover's mouth, and now settled in happily sucks away at used adipose tissue with its opposite number. Grab of gravity more or less suspends itself.

00:23:58

GALWAY KINNELL

Across the forehead of a woman who sees that after 13,001 American nights, she hasn't a single love story to tell. Across the face of the grave digger who sits down to rest in the shade of a cypress, just as the preacher starts his yammer and yack. Across the temples of doctor and patient, who knock noggins while studying X-rays. Across the brow of D.H. Lawrence, who can't think of what could have gotten into him when, in his poem "Snake," he calls the earthen fisher that the snake slides into, into that dreadful hole, that horrid black hole. Gravity and graves are not fully erasable frown. In the wings of the Eskimo curlew flapping up the thinning airs of the Andes and the sacral vertebrae of the widow stooping low to peer under her drawn blind. In the skin under the eyes of a woman who loves a man who is incapable of loving and because of him she still, because she still loves him, approaches critical radius and before long will enter isolation of a density of 100,000 tons per pore in the saliva accumulating in the mouth of a child sitting in shriek position in a dentist chair.

00:25:46

GALWAY KINNELL

In the numeral keys, totting up how many humans humans have killed in the course of time. In this caged flesh, falling in shreds off bodies of children, lurching toward the Nakashima River and all shrieking together as if this is an aria they have rehearsed. Gravity trembles in its mathematical helplessness. As long as two creatures live to be 100, because they have developed a mutual hatred so terrible in even nonexistence, can't abide them. As long as the man's body, though more dense, slides and slips around on the woman's body, and often at the end, ends up still on top. As long as the hummingbird strikes the air, give or take, 74 times per second. As long as a mound of loam still stands naturally next to the rectangular hole waiting to be filled, gravity cannot be said to have imposed its will. If the pilot ejects even one second too late, if the condemned man standing on the trap door feels all the slack, suddenly rush through the slip noose around his neck, if underneath that man a change in wind pitch affirms that the bomb bay doors are open. If a man who has always been awkward at sports holds a baby in his arms with flames at his back, and from below, equally awkward people call up, throw her down. Don't worry, we'll catch her. If the colored plates, riddled with sulphurous inclusions creak and grok, and the bowsprit points up and the stern points to the bottom.

00:28:05

GALWAY KINNELL

If a trillion years from now, the souls beaching it out on Long Beach will still be waiting for their collision with the sun. If the juggler falls just a shade behind in her count, and a flashy object zips past the exact spot where her other hand was to pluck it just in time out of the air, gravity does not pause to discuss an occasional error. In the case of the last tree, a deeper still turning out its terrified wood. In the case of the concertina wire standing in high spirited spirals between the rich and the poor in case of howls sent swirling into space through broken madhouse windows. In the case of the word heavenly when we stop and remember, if we can, that earth was a heavenly body once. In the case of the man who strays into a gravitational field where the differential between upward pull on his scalp and downward force on his foot soles stretches him into a kind of alimentary canal. The thickness of a thread and a mile long. In the case of the child doing his homework on the dining room table and his left elbow knocks over his ink bottle, and he quickly shifts into damage control and presses his belly tight to the table edge and holds his arms down as hard as he can on both sides of the tabletop and so staunches the spill around him. But he can't, of course, leave this spot lest it start flowing, and all he can do is watch the blackest of inks creeping to the far end of the table and sliding under the seam of the table leaf and pouring itself in a shower over the ancient pink carpet. Gravity would, if it could recuse itself.

00:30:44

GALWAY KINNELL

When sensing danger, cichlid babies shrink themselves until they outweigh water and tumble quickly to the lake bottom. When a deer stands entirely still in a field, she lets us know for a moment or two that we exist only within her mind. When a person standing in a military seminar among in a military cemetery, among grave markers, going all the way out to every horizon, understands all of the existence has been completely destroyed at least that many times over when depression after mania causes clocks to stick and days to turn with a heavy squinch, when someone lies in bed entangled in nothing but gravity, yet still can only toss and roll. When the full moon's beady gleam fixes on a sleeper, and calls to his atavistic soul and tears at his bonds, which break and its body remingles with his soul again and drags and thumps it down the dark staircase out to the flooded river. There a soldier is being whirled, wheeled to yet one more hopeless surgery, a soldier who has resolved to remain asleep through all eternity and not wake again until such time as time begins again. Gravity grips us to the earth, crossing its fingers.

00:32:51

GALWAY KINNELL

And on we go to a short poem called "Turkeys." These aren't the turkeys that normally appear on Thanksgiving tables, but larger and more ancient breed of turkey that you find in the country often. Sometimes we saw shadows of gods in the trees. Silenced we went on. Sometimes the dog would bound off over the snow into the forest. Sometimes a tree had 20 or more black turkeys in it, each seeming the size of a small bear. We remember them from the time we heard what seemed a burst of light gunfire in the high limbs of a Cortland, when a hen shook the apples down into her flock. Sometimes I believed I would never come out of the woods. I thought the deeper darkness might absorb me or feed me to the black turkeys, and I would cry out for the dog, and the dog would not answer.

00:34:30

GALWAY KINNELL

Esalen, most of you know, is on the West coast of California and they have a nice place you can go for rest and recreation. But they also have a little poetry establishment connected to them. And I went out there a few times to teach poetry, which can't be taught. So, anyway, I wrote this poem, "The Sulfur Baths at Esalen." So there are sulfur baths, and you go out and sit in the water that comes out of the cliffs and just your head is sticking up and that's all you see of some people for the rest of the day. Those heads must belong to the two students I haven't yet met. Sitting there up to their necks in the sulfurous water, the sunken rest of them blurry, ragged, dissolving or dissolved like albumen of an egg being poached. The shuddery oiliness of the water slops with flashes of sky and reeks almost sweetly of the bowels of the earth. When I come abreast and uncinch and drop my towel, the two heads swivel as one unsynchronized axes and gaze at me for a moment, which goes on too long, in my opinion, to be still called a moment. (laughter) Possibly these two react as I do and convert into words most of what they see, navel squinting through nearly shut lids, flesh falling in squeals as if partly melted. Cock looking as if it hasn't been up and crowing at first light lately. "Good morning," I tell them. "Good morning, good morning," they reply. I see that to them I'm just another naked body entering the sulfurous water, a body not as it was, and certainly not as it might wish to be. As I sit down up to my chin in steamy bath water, I wonder if I have ever written a truthful poem.

00:37:49

GALWAY KINNELL

So this is a poem in the voice of a coyote. Imaginary voice of a coyote. How did I get this bejeweled look? Was it that last time when I fled across the pasture and up to the edge of the thick woods, and turned and gazed back in order to hold events in the exact sequence. Man standing over a bloody mess of cow who has birthed her calf. Calf which I, coyote, have eaten of, but eaten, alas, too far beyond the boundary over which after matter turns into calf. And that is why I fled, inwardly singing, of course, up to the woods edge and there beheld man raise and steady his over and under, and squeeze its big trigger. And I, coyote, took all this in, watched the leaden cartridges smash singing at me through the singing air and hit this now stilled wraith whose flickers through the trees with his cracked forever jawbone. From now on, alone, I took all this in. I, coyote, still wonder. Did I say I, coyote, stilled wonder. That would that would ruin the poem. Perhaps it did. I don't know. (laughter)

00:40:04

GALWAY KINNELL

Well, you know, probably everybody of a certain age has been involved just briefly or what, with somebody else in their youth. Maybe their first love and then whatever happened, nothing came of that brief but perhaps intense relationship. And so perhaps when one is old, I being old can say that. You can take the perhaps out of that sentence. Perhaps as some long period where one has never thought of that person, then suddenly one has.

00:41:13

GALWAY KINNELL

"The Old Sea." The old sea is the Mediterranean and this poem is written by somebody who evidently is, has gone out to Europe and rented a room in a hotel he used to know and where he met that woman. By virtue of a small whirling disk the hotel room beside the ancient sea fills with Mozart's duo sonatas for violin and piano, as played by Clara Haskell and Arthur Grumiaux separate souls who were, from the moment their musics mingled forever entwined. Outside, lighted by lightning bolts, one and then one, the sea toiled itself nearly white. Long ago on the sea, on the deck of a ship next to coils of heavy line were two passengers, strangers to each other, both leaving port side and setting out for Beirut, they collided at once, then separated, then lay talking almost through the entire night, almost passing into each other. Do we first love only at first. And then again that flash. Do we always separate?

00:43:12

GALWAY KINNELL

She was a petite soeur de Jesus, very French, returning to her quarters in Beirut. I in my 20s, uneasy, shy, not used to women, vagabonding around the world. The booms and wild flashes in the sky now abated. We two the only passengers aboard, unable to afford berths lay down for the night amidships flat on our backs on one small blanket apiece telling each other the little confusions we took for our mysteries. And then a half sky of stars slowly opened. All its constellations were strangely legible. Odd, for ever since their advent, the stars have been struggling to hurl themselves apart. I did not let her know that her beauty had amazed me. I kept to myself my yearning to find out what her vows allowed or precluded. In our silence Saint Elmo's fire glowed.

00:44:33

GALWAY KINNELL

Now that I'm old, I think back to those two. What was it they lacked? I imagine that one day before I die, some ordinary evening, I will give a start as I totter in the way old people do from toilet to sink to icebox to TV to radio to window, then back to chair. I will hear behind me in long ago memory, a hard ten-fingered crashing from Haskell's piano and from Gremio's violin a single hammered cord. Doubtless I will give some kind of cry. Then fall back into my chair and then sit there trembling, I don't know why, for a little while and then lose track.

00:45:37

GALWAY KINNELL

Now have I gone over the the the time I'm allotted? Is that, no, no or is it, no, keep going? (laughter) Okay because I want to read, I would like to read a poem that's a little long, so I won't preface it too much or hardly at all. It's a poem about a poem that or an evening of poetry about Christopher Smart, that brilliant but doomed English poet of the 18th century. And his poems do one thing, and then I'll go right into reading it. They were written not in da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum, unlike all the other poems of his day. Nor were they written in da da dum da da dum dum da dum or nor were they written in prose and then bunched into a poem, but they were actually the first instance of a poet consciously writing free verse. He discovered it. He discovered it by reading the Bible and the Bible is actually written, or I would say the Bible, but big sections of the Bible, the King James Bible is written in free verse and the free verse is not just prose. The free verse is a lilting and beautiful sound. And the next person who wrote a great book using the free verse that Smart discovered was Allen Ginsberg in "Howl."

00:48:36

GALWAY KINNELL

So the poem goes like this. So from poet to poet, we proceeded in our celebration of Christopher Smart's long undiscovered poem, "Jubilate Agno," composed by this profligate, drunken, devout, mad polymath between 1759 and 1763 while Incarcerated for a year in Saint Luke's Hospital for the insane, and then for four or five years more in the less bedlamic asylum at Bethnal Green. Drawing on books he brought with him, or borrowed from other madhouse libraries, too, and availing himself of his own waggery, his own observation and wide learning, his prodigious memory and excited imaginings for I am not without authority in my jeopardy. He extracted out of his whirling brain one, two, sometimes three lines a day, to keep himself sane for a profound sanity underlies his project to repair our connection with the natural world by joining person after person, Joram or Taleb or Ehud, or Haggith, or Bernice, or Shobab, or Joab, with an animal or insect, tree, plant, flower or precious stone. Almost any living or even nearly living entity would do.

00:50:16

GALWAY KINNELL

From the Zuni to the great flabber jabber flat clapping fish, Smart thought of his grand but unfinished poem as his Magnificat, with its thrilling call and responses forming a long healing roll call of all earthlings. And so, 215 years later, 21 poets gathered on a February night in a little church on Lower Fifth Avenue, and one by one we stood up and read or recited to a large and ardent audience, 30 lines or so per poet from "Jubilate Agno." Mere floccinaucinihilipilification means not important to the world outside, but to us a source of joy and truth. The lung ether in the living loving the long dead. Some poets were attracted to passages they knew, such as Etheridge Knight, who, like Kit Smart, had done time. Let Andrew rejoice with the whale who is arrayed in beauteous blue, and is a combination of bulk and activity for they work me with their harping ions, which is a barbarous instrument, because I am more unguarded than the rest. Or like Allen Ginsberg, who moved perhaps by Kitt's madness in his gentlest voice, allowed that in writing "Howl" he had communed with the genius of Smart's prosody. Then he chanted rejoice with beauty, with beauty oh, who hath three testicles for I bless God and the strength of my loins, and for the voice which he hath made sonorous. Whereupon Grace Paley, born Grace Goodside to immigrant Ukrainian socialists, here now in her earthly glory, took herself to the podium and lovingly bronxst let Milka rejoice with the horned beetle, who will strike a man in the face, for I am the Lord's newswriter, the scribe evangelist.

00:52:50

GALWAY KINNELL

Then Philip Levine, he, too, had drawn singing breaths into himself from Smart's incantations in his Phil's own great poem, "They Feed They Lion" got up and said, "Let Hulda bless with the silkworm the ornaments of the proud are from the bowels of their betters." After him came elegant David Ignatow, followed by Alan Grossman, our philosopher. Then Nancy Willard, our magician. Jane Cooper's tremulous piping floated down from the vaulted ceiling and reminded us, "Earth, which is in intelligence, hath a voice and a propensity, this propensity to sing, to speak in all its parts." And Gerald Stern, with his own joyfully smarty and super exuberance, announced as if eureka, he'd just learned how to do it. The circle may be squared by how do you square it? By swelling and flattening. Joel Oppenheimer came after him, followed by Harvey Shapiro and Gregory Orr and a lion-tongued Thomas Luks who roared for the coffin and the cradle and the purse are all against a man. But Vertamae Grosvenor, oh, Smartie. A name whose first language Gullah, reached her on the tongues of Sea Islanders, called us back into happiness. Rejoice with the pigeon, who is an antidote to malignity, and will carry a letter.

00:54:37

GALWAY KINNELL

Next, Paul Zweig, beautiful, doomed spirit, told us harpsichords are best strung with gold wire, and from Alan plans fishermen by trade, "Let Jude be the bream who is melancholy for his depth and serenity. For I have a greater compass of mirth and melancholy than another." Then Stanley Plumly recited, then David Cumberland, then me, and next James Wright, who read the passage that Jerry Sterne surely would have wanted Kit's elegy to his cat, Jeoffry, his only faithful companion. For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. There is nothing brisker than his life when in motion. Last to the podium was Muriel Rukeyser, who once wrote in her, wrote her own smarty and vow never to despise in myself what I have been taught to despise and never to despise the other. And concluded her tender ode to cockroaches, "So I reach, I touch, I begin to know you." Now Muriel was soaring on Kit Smarts words and the faces in the nave all lifted as one amazed all of them by her huge head, her heart shaped face, her ferocious beauty and her voice growly at its edges, "For I have a providential acquaintance with men who bear the names of animals" and everyone there was with her. The little church swelled with light. The podium itself seemed to be attempting to raise itself up, for I bless God for Mr. Lion, Mr. Cock, Mr. Cat, Mr. Talbot, Mr. Hart, Mrs. Fish, Mr. Grubb and Miss Lamb. And now it was evident that the podium was not rising, but that Muriel was sinking. Toppling, in fact, hauling down on herself the microphone and the amplifier and their wires into a heap on the floor. Then from this wreckage, her suddenly reclined voice was heard, "Let Zadok worship with the mole before honor is humility."

00:57:05

GALWAY KINNELL

As we disentangled her, she sat up and she said, "She that looketh low shall learn." A woman rushed out of the door, crying, "I'm calling an ambulance." "No ambulance!" Muriel shouted after, "I need a chair." A plump man came swiftly wriggling through the audience. "I'm a doctor. A doctor!" "No doctors," Muriel shouted even louder. "A chair! A chair!" Eased into a chair at last, she smiled. Let carpus rejoice with the frogfish. A woman cannot die on her knees. For all those who were at the Church of the Transfiguration that evening in 1978, and those who may have heard about it later, and those of you hearing of it now for the first time, and for Kit Smart, who died in debtors prison in 1771 at 49, and for Muriel, who would die two years after that night, and for these witnesses who are also gone, Paul and Etheridge and Jane and Joel and Alan and Alan and Grace and David and James and Joel and the carrier pigeon, too. And for the rest of us still standing or sitting or soon to topple, let all of us rejoice and be made glad. Thank you. Thank you very much. (applause)

01:00:12

SPEAKER_S3

What? Oh, good. And "Et Tu," is written in deliberate, free verse. So from Smart to Whitman to Ginsberg. The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me. He complains of my gab and my loitering. I, too, am not a bit tamed. I, too, am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me. It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds. It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air. I shake my white locks in the runaway sun. I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean. But I shall be good health to you nevertheless and filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you. (applause)