Preface: I left Foothill College Krause Center at 5:35 pm
and got the 5:50 pm Bus #40 to Showers Drive. Got the 6:05 pm Bus #522
that didn't go to the Palo Alto Train Depot which is under repair. It stopped in Menlo Park,
and I meandered back for the 7:10 pm Palm Express Bus to the Oval. Walked to
Cubberley Auditorium by 7:30 pm, and sat in the 4th row near the Exit,
as the first three rows were reserved for English Department.
Pinsky read 10 poems, nine were in the four books
checked out from Los Altos Library that were transferred from other
Santa Clara Libraries which I placed on hold a few weeks back.
He also answered questions after reading 8 poems, and
read the last two poems requested by the audience—
"The Want Bone" & "The Shirt".
The Poetry Reading was over at 9:05 pm.
I rushed to Tresidder Student Union to catch
the last 9:23 pm Shopping Express Shuttle Bus
to Showers Drive at 9:40 pm.
The last Bus #40 came at 10:21 pm to take me home.
Eavan Boland, Director of the Creative Writing Program,
appreciated Nancy and Larry Mohr for their support inviting visiting poets to Stanford.
She then introduced Robert Pinsky “whose poems are compelling, shaping
the private and public domains. Pinsky was born in 1940 in New Jersey, and teaches at Boston University.
As a young poet, he was a Stegner Fellow studying at Stanford with Yvor Winters. His poem "The Shirt"
in Jersey Rain is well known. Our past Mohr Poet,
Louise Glück says
"Pinsky has dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with
subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions."
Pinsky's latest book At the Foundling Hospital (2016) has been nominated for this year's
National Book Award.
As three-time US. Poet Laureate (1997-2000), he initiated
the Favorite Poem Project.
We welcome Robert Pinsky to read to us today.” Pinsky's Reading filled up
Cubberley Auditorium. I've typed the ten poems Pinsky read tonight from his books,
with links to their source.
Robert Pinsky: Thank you Eavan for the warm introduction. I'm happy to be back
at Stanford. When I was taking classes here with Yvor Winters,
I learned about 16th century poetry. So I'll begin with this poem by
Thomas Campion (Pinsky recited it from memory
and received an enthusiastic ovation. He said "it's Campion's poem not mine.")
(1) THOMAS CAMPION (1567-1620), "NOW WINTER NIGHTS ENLARGE"
Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours,
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers;
Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o'erflow with wine,
Let well-tuned words amaze
With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
Shall wait on honey love
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
Sleep's leaden spells remove.
This time doth well dispence
With lovers' long discourse;
Much speech hath some defense,
Though beauty no remorse.
All do not all things well;
Some measures comely tread,
Some knotted riddles tell,
Some poems smoothly read.
The Summer hath his joys,
And winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys,
They shorten tedious nights.
— Singing School (2013), p. 91
(web)
(2) SAMURAI SONG (Video)
When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.
When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.
When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.
When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.
When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.
When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.
Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.
— Jersey Rain (2000), p. 3
(web)
(3) THE FOUNDLING TOKENS
At the Foundling Hospital
For each abandoned
Baby a duly recorded token:
Bit of lace or a pewter brooch,
Identifying coin, button
Or bangle. One crushed thimble,
Noted at admission. Or paper:
At the Foundling Museum
A wall displaying hundreds
Of scraps, each pinned once
To some one particular infant's
Nightie, nappie or blanket.
Each with surviving particulate
Ink or graphite in studied lines
Betokening a life. Sometimes
A name— by rule never
To be used again for that
Foundling. And often,
Verses quoted or composed:
Hard is my Lot in deep Distress
To have no help where Mot should find.
Sure Nature meant her sacred Laws
Should men as strong as Women bind.
Regardless he, Unable I,
To keep this image of my Heart
'Tis vile to Murder! hard to Starve
And Death almost to me to part!
If Fortune should her favours give
That I in Better plight may Live
I'd try to have my Boy again
And train him up the best of Men.
"To have" meaning to
Reclaim but also in the mind
To have again that same
Foundling, paternity
Regardless. The same
Boy again, reconceived.
|
Token meaning a least
Irreducible particle
Of meaning. Or token meaning
Token black, token woman,
Token gesture.
They sent the infant foundlings
To wet nurses, most of them
Out in the country. The foster
Mother by contract after
A few years returned the child
Ready for schooling
To the Foundling Hospital—
Unconsulted but retained
Relic syllables of a name
Or lines, bauble or needlework.
On the slave passage some Africans
Inscribed their true names into the hull
As though someday to be
Pronounced again.
Also the Chinese immigrants
In the dark Angel Island
Internment cells of San Francisco,
Many to be deported, wrote verses
Found on the walls above their bunks.
Fragment of a tune or a rhyme or name
Mumbled from memory. Indeed
Into a bar of soap or even scraped
Into the very death-compound dirt
Or hut dirt or chalked onto pavement—
Scratched or smeared or intoned
Betokening. Or in the ordinary plight.
Of insomnia reciting memorized
Avenues through the expanses
Of loss. Although almost never was
A foundling reclaimed, ever.
|
— At
the Foundling Hospital (2016), pp. 19-22
(web)
(4) IN THE COMA
My friend was in a coma, so I dove
Deep into his brain to word him back. I tried
To sing Hallelujah, I Just Love Her So in
Ray Charles's voice. Of course the silence grew.
I couldn't sing the alphabet song. My voice
Couldn't say words I knew: Because I Could
Not Stop for Death, He Kindly Stopped for Me.
I couldn't remember the Dodgers and the Giants.
I tried to tell the stories that he and I
Studied when we were young. It was confused,
The Invisible Man was laughing at how a man
Felt History jump out of his thick fair head
And beat him half to death, as being the nightmare
Out of which Isaac Babel tried to awake.
The quiet. Next time won't you sing with me.
Those great diminished chords: A girl I know.
The cold of the coma, lightless. The ocean floor.
I struggled to tell things back from decades gone.
The mournful American soldier testifying
About My Lai: I shot the older lady.
Viola Liuzzo, Spiro Agnew, Jim Jones.
And by the time I count from one to four
I hear her knocking. Quiet of the deep,
Our mouths are open but we cannot sing..
— At
the Foundling Hospital (2016), pp. 33-34
(web)
(5) CREOLE
I'm tired of the gods, I'm pious about the ancestors: afloat
In the wake widening behind me in time, the restive devisers.
My father had one job from high school till he got fired at thirty.
The year was 1947 and his boss, planning to run for mayor,
Wanted to hire an Italian veteran, he explained, putting it
In plain English. I was seven years old, my sister was two.
The barbarian tribes in the woods were so savage the Empire
Had to conquer them to protect and clear its perimeter.
So into the woods Rome sent out missions of civilizing
Governors and invaders to establish schools, courts, garrisons:
Soldiers, clerks, officials, citizens with their household slaves.
Years or decades or entire lives were spent out in the hinterlands—
Which might be good places to retire on a government pension,
Especially if in those work-years you had acquired a native wife.
Often I get these things wrong or at best mixed up but I do
Feel piety toward those persistent mixed families in Gaul,
Britain, Thrace. When I die may I take my place in the wedge
Widening and churning in the mortal ocean of years of souls.
As I get it, the Roman colonizing and mixing, the intricate Imperial
Processes of enslaving and freeing, involved not just the inevitable
Fucking in all senses of the word, but also marriages and births
As developers and barbers, scribes and thugs mingled and coupled
With the native people and peoples. Begetting and trading, they
Needed to swap, blend and improvise languages— couples
Especially needed to invent French, Spanish, German: and I confess—
Roman, barbarian— I find that Creole work more glorious than God.
The way it happened, the school sent around a notice: anybody
Interested in becoming an apprentice optician, raise your hand.
It was the Great Depression, anything about a job sounded good to
Milford Pinsky, who told me he thought it meant a kind of dentistry.
Anyway, he was bored sitting in study hall, so he raised his hand,
And he got the job as was his destiny— full-time, once he graduated.
Joe Schiavone was the veteran who took the job, not a bad guy,
Dr. Vineburg did get elected mayor, Joe worked for him for years.
At the bank an Episcopalian named John Smock, whose family owned
A piece of the bank, had played sports with Milford. He gave him a small
Loan with no collateral, so he opened his own shop, grinding lenses
And selling glasses: as his mother-in-law said, "almost a Professional."
Optician comes from a Greek word that has to do with seeing.
Banker comes from an Italian word for a bench, where people sat,
I imagine, and made loans or change. Pinsky like "Tex" or "Brooklyn"
Is a name nobody would have if they were still in that same place:
Those names all signify someone who's been away from home a while.
Schiavone means "a Slav." Milford is a variant on the names of poets—
Milton, Herbert, Sidney— certain immigrants gave their offspring.
Creole comes from a word meaning to breed or to create, in a place.
— At
the Foundling Hospital (2016), pp. 9-12
(web)
I like to thank Nancy & Larry Mohr for sponsoring the
Mohr
Visiting Poet Series
at Stanford. Some say poetry is at the fringe. I say poetry is not the fringe
but the center of human intelligence. Here's my latest poem read
at a Writers Resist event hosted by PEN America on the steps of the
New York Public Library on January 15, 2017. It is posted at
CNN Opinions "An inaugural poem of protest".
(6) EXILE and LIGHTNING
You choose your ancestors our
Ancestor Ralph Ellison wrote.
Now, fellow-descendants, we endure a
Moment of charismatic indecency
And sanctimonious greed. Falsehood
Beyond shame. Our Polish Grandfather
Milosz and African American Grandmother Brooks
Endured worse than this.
Fight first, then fiddle she wrote.
Our great-grandmother Emma Lazarus
Wrote that the flame of the lamp of the
Mother of Exiles is "Imprisoned lightning."
My fellow children of exile
And lightning, the indecency
Constructs its own statuary.
But our uncle Ernesto Cardenal
Says, sabemos que el pueblo
la derribar‡ un d’a. The people
Will tear it down. Milosz says,
Beautiful and very young, meaning recent,
Are poetry and philo-sophia, meaning science,
Her ally in the service of the good...
Their enemies, he wrote, have delivered
Themselves to destruction.
"Un dia," and "very young"— that long
Ancestral view of time:
Inheritors, el pueblo, fellow-exiles:
All the quicker our need to
Fight and make music. As Gwendolyn
Brooks wrote, To civilize a space.
— CNN Opinions, January 20, 2017
(7) AN OLD MAN
After Cavafy
Back in a corner, alone in the clatter and babble
An old man sits with his head bent over a table
And his newspaper in front of him, in the café.
Sour with old age, he ponders a dreary truth—
How little he enjoyed the years when he had youth,
Good looks and strength and clever things to say.
He knows he's quite old now: he feels it, he sees it,
And yet the time when was young seems— was it?
Yesterday. How quickly, how quickly it slipped away.
Now he sees how Discretion has betrayed him,
And how stupidly he let the liar persuade him
With phrases: Tomorrow. There's plenty of time. Some day.
He recalls teh pull of impulses he suppressed,
The joy he sacrificed. Every chance he lost
Ridicules his brainless prudence a different way.
But all these thoughts and memories have made
The old man dizzy. He falls asleep, his head
Resting on the table in the noisy café.
— The Want Bone (1990)
Selected Poems (2011), p. 121
(web)
(8) THE FORGETTING
The forgetting I notice most as I get older is really a form of memory:
The undergrowth of things unknown to you young, that I have forgotten.
Memory of so much crap, jumbled with so much that seems to matter.
Lieutenant Calley. Captain Easy. Mayling Soong. Sibby Sisti.
And all the forgettings that preceded my own: Baghdad, Egypt, Greece,
The Plains, centuries of lootings of antiquities. Obscure atrocities.
Imagine!— a big tent filled with mostly kids, yelling for poetry. In fact
It happened, I was there in New Jersey at the famous poetry show.
I used to wonder, what if the Baseball Hall of Fame overflowed
With too many thousands of greats all in time unremembered?
Hardly anybody can name all eight of their great-grandparents.
Can you? Will your children's grandchildren remember your name?
You'll see, you little young jerks: your favorite music and your political
Furors, too, will need to get sorted in dusty electronic corridors.
In 1972, Chou En-lai was asked the lasting effects of the French
Revolution: "Too soon to tell." Remember?— or was it Mao Tse-tung?
Poetry made of air strains to reach back to Begats and suspiring
Forward into air, grunting to beget the hungry or overfed Future.
Ezra Pound praises the Emperor who appointed a committee of scholars
To pick the best 450 Noh plays and destroy all the rest, the fascist.
The stand-up master Steven Wright says he thinks he suffers from
Both amnesia and déjà vu: "I feel like I have forgotten this before."
Who remembers the arguments when jurors gave Pound the only prize
For poetry awarded by the United States Government? Until then.
I was in the big tent when the guy read his poem about how the Jews
Were warned to get out of the Twin Towers before the planes hit.
The crowd was applauding and screaming, they were happy— it isn't
That they were anti-Semitic, or anything. They just weren't listening, Or
No, they were listening, but that certain way. In it comes, you hear it, and
That selfsame second you swallow it or expel it: an ecstasy of forgetting.
— Gulf Music (2007), pp. 14-15
(9) THE WANT BONE
The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth's bell.
Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue.
The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale
Gaped on nothing but sand on either side.
The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing,
A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung.
The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving
And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O.
Ossified cords held the corners together
In groined spirals pleated like a summer dress.
But where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?
Infinitesimal mouths bore it away,
The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean.
But O I love you it sings, my little my country
My food my parent my child I want you my own
my flower my fin my life my lightness my O.
— The Want Bone (1990)
Selected Poems (2011), p. 101
(web)
(10) THE SHIRT
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze
At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—
The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out
Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once
He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—
Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, "shrill shirt ballooning."
Wonderful how the patern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans
Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,
The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:
George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit
And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,
The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.
— The Want Bone (1990), pp. 53-54
Selected Poems (2011), pp. 102-104
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