I'm here to give you
your recommended dietary allowance
of poetry.
And the way I'm going to do that
is present to you
five animations
of five of my poems.
And let me just tell you a little bit of how that came about.
Because the mixing of those two media
is a sort of unnatural or unnecessary act.
But when I was United States Poet Laureate --
and I love saying that.
(Laughter)
It's a great way to start sentences.
When I was him back then,
I was approached by J. Walter Thompson, the ad company,
and they were hired
sort of by the Sundance Channel.
And the idea was to have me record some of my poems
and then they would find animators
to animate them.
And I was initially resistant,
because I always think
poetry can stand alone by itself.
Attempts to put my poems to music
have had disastrous results,
in all cases.
And the poem, if it's written with the ear,
already has been set to its own verbal music
as it was composed.
And surely, if you're reading a poem
that mentions a cow,
you don't need on the facing page
a drawing of a cow.
I mean, let's let the reader do a little work.
But I relented because it seemed like an interesting possibility,
and also I'm like a total cartoon junkie
since childhood.
I think more influential
than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth
on my imagination
were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies
and Loony Tunes cartoons.
Bugs Bunny is my muse.
And this way poetry could find its way onto television of all places.
And I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places --
poetry on buses, poetry on subways,
on billboards, on cereal boxes.
When I was Poet Laureate, there I go again --
I can't help it, it's true --
(Laughter)
I created a poetry channel on Delta Airlines
that lasted for a couple of years.
So you could tune into poetry as you were flying.
And my sense is,
it's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves
and more into public life.
Start a meeting with a poem. That would be an idea you might take with you.
When you get a poem on a billboard or on the radio
or on a cereal box or whatever,
it happens to you so suddenly
that you don't have time
to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields
that were installed in high school.
So let us start with the first one.
It's a little poem called "Budapest,"
and in it I reveal,
or pretend to reveal,
the secrets of the creative process.
(Video) Narration: "Budapest."
My pen moves along the page
like the snout of a strange animal
shaped like a human arm
and dressed in the sleeve
of a loose green sweater.
I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly,
intent as any forager
that has nothing on its mind
but the grubs and insects
that will allow it to live another day.
It wants only to be here tomorrow,
dressed perhaps
in the sleeve of a plaid shirt,
nose pressed against the page,
writing a few more dutiful lines
while I gaze out the window
and imagine Budapest
or some other city
where I have never been.
BC: So that makes it seem a little easier.
(Applause)
Writing is not actually as easy as that for me.
But I like to pretend that it comes with ease.
One of my students came up after class, an introductory class,
and she said, "You know, poetry is harder than writing,"
which I found both erroneous and profound.
(Laughter)
So I like to at least pretend it just flows out.
A friend of mine has a slogan; he's another poet.
He says that, "If at first you don't succeed,
hide all evidence you ever tried."
(Laughter)
The next poem is also rather short.
Poetry just says a few things in different ways.
And I think you could boil this poem down to saying,
"Some days you eat the bear, other days the bear eats you."
And it uses the imagery
of dollhouse furniture.
(Video) Narration: "Some Days."
Some days
I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.
All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress --
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.
But other days I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.
Very funny.
But how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it
striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there
amidst the wallpaper
staring straight ahead
with your little plastic face?
(Applause)
BC: There's a horror movie in there somewhere.
The next poem is called forgetfulness,
and it's really just a kind of poetic essay
on the subject of mental slippage.
And the poem begins
with a certain species of forgetfulness
that someone called
literary amnesia,
in other words, forgetting the things that you have read.
(Video) Narration: "Forgetfulness."
The name of the author is the first to go,
followed obediently
by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion,
the entire novel,
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of.
It is as if, one by one,
the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain
to a little fishing village
where there are no phones.
Long ago,
you kissed the names of the nine muses good-bye
and you watched the quadratic equation
pack its bag.
And even now,
as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away,
a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle,
the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is
you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking
in some obscure corner
of your spleen.
It has floated away
down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L
as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion
where you will join those
who have forgotten even how to swim
and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle
in a book on war.
No wonder the Moon in the window
seems to have drifted out of a love poem
that you used to know by heart.
(Applause)
BC: The next poem is called "The Country"
and it's based on,
when I was in college
I met a classmate who remains to be a friend of mine.
He lived, and still does, in rural Vermont.
I lived in New York City.
And we would visit each other.
And when I would go up to the country,
he would teach me things like deer hunting,
which meant getting lost with a gun basically --
(Laughter)
and trout fishing and stuff like that.
And then he'd come down to New York City
and I'd teach him what I knew,
which was largely smoking and drinking.
(Laughter)
And in that way we traded lore with each other.
The poem that's coming up
is based on him trying to tell me a little something
about a domestic point of etiquette
in country living
that I had a very hard time, at first, processing.
It's called "The Country."
(Video) Narration: "The Country."
I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden strike-anywhere matches
just lying around the house,
because the mice might get into them
and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down
on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.
Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe
behind the floral wallpaper,
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,
the blue tip scratching against rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare
and the creature, for one bright, shining moment,
suddenly thrust ahead of his time --
now a fire-starter,
now a torch-bearer
in a forgotten ritual,
little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night?
And who could fail to notice,
lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment
on the faces of his fellow mice --
one-time inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?
(Applause)
BC: Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you. And the last poem is called "The Dead."
I wrote this after a friend's funeral,
but not so much about the friend as something the eulogist kept saying,
as all eulogists tend to do,
which is how happy the deceased would be
to look down and see all of us assembled.
And that to me was a bad start to the afterlife,
having to witness your own funeral and feel gratified.
So the little poem is called "The Dead."
(Video) Narration: "The Dead."
The dead are always looking down on us,
they say.
While we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down
through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly
through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads
moving below on Earth.
And when we lie down
in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps
by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars
and fall silent
and wait like parents
for us to close our eyes.
(Applause)
BC: I'm not sure if other poems will be animated.
It took a long time --
I mean, it's rather uncommon to have this marriage --
a long time to put those two together.
But then again, it took us a long time
to put the wheel and the suitcase together.
(Laughter)
I mean, we had the wheel for some time.
And schlepping is an ancient and honorable art.
(Laughter)
I just have time
to read a more recent poem to you.
If it has a subject,
the subject is adolescence.
And it's addressed to a certain person.
It's called "To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl."
"Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon
on the day you were born,
you would be all done in only one more year?
Of course, you couldn't have done that all alone.
So never mind;
you're fine just being yourself.
You're loved for just being you.
But did you know that at your age
Judy Garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture,
Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory
and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room --
no wait, I mean he had invented the calculator?
Of course, there will be time for all that
later in your life,
after you come out of your room
and begin to blossom,
or at least pick up all your socks.
For some reason I keep remembering
that Lady Jane Grey was queen of England
when she was only 15.
But then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.
(Laughter)
A few centuries later,
when he was your age,
Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family,
but that did not keep him
from composing two symphonies, four operas
and two complete masses as a youngster.
(Laughter)
But of course, that was in Austria
at the height of Romantic lyricism,
not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.
(Laughter)
Frankly, who cares
if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15
or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
We think you're special just being you --
playing with your food and staring into space.
(Laughter)
By the way,
I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,
but that doesn't mean he never helped out around the house."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
Thanks.
(Applause)