Voice Tags Used in Events

[Laughter]

[Laughter]

[Laughter]

[Laughter]

Um, but I, yeah, and I hope it's, um, I don't know, people have read it as being a work of love and, of deep love, even though I know that I take a pretty snippy tone.

Yeah, well, it, it is apparent in some cases, particularly with your father -- and to a certain degree with your mother, though, it's clear in the end that you did have great love for her, but still, the portrait is, is not exactly, you know, an valentine.

No, it's not sentimental, and I, and I don't do sentimentals.

I wouldn't accuse you of sentimentality, no.

No.

Urania and his father are invented characters.

Only in exceptional circumstances I write against books. I write against ideas, but against poems or novels. I usually don't do it. I write when I am enthusiastic about something, you know?

Oh, well, I can answer with a Borges quotation. Say, when you look yourself at a mirror, you don't know how your face is. You don't know if you are handsome or very ugly. It's very difficult. You don't really know. I would like my books to have the same influence that the great writers that I admire, but I really don't know what my own books are, you know? I don't know. I cannot measure them with the minimal objectivity that I can value, books of others.

Well, in my case, there is never purely imagination. Even the novels in which I have been less, let's say, detached of personal experience to write, I think there is always a root with this in my memory and certain images that are the raw material are to fantasize, to imagine, you know?

Oh, because there are authors who are not in any way enthusiastic with the idea of changing the world? No. Balzac, for example, he was a real reactionary.

That's a hard question.

There were poetry sections, but there wasn't a free-standing poetry library. And my response was of course we should have one, but it shouldn't be just an adjunct to any other organization or office. It should be a center of the life of poetry in our culture. And it should be a place, above all, that would be open to poets in particular and to the public in general. And a sort of communication center as well as a house of hospitality. That was my immediate response.

Yeah, nobody possesses poetry. Poetry posesses you, is another way of putting it. So that was the beginning.

Why do we need poetry? Because every great civilization has demonstrated the need for myth and poetry in the effectiveness of the state itself beyond power, beyond military strength, beyond commerce. What a great civilization needs to demonstrate is the power of what it stands for in terms of human dignity and freedom. And the word, the myth, is essential to the survival of civilization, and to the culmination of its powers. I think anyone who studies history would have to agree to that.

I feel exactly the same way. I am very passionate about my politics. And it's not conservative. So.

I think that--so many poets have told me they did the same thing.

I think that was central to my sense of loss, my sense of yearning. You know Henry James' wonderful phrase in one of his letters when he says, "the port from which I set out was the port of my loneliness."

In a way, that seemed perfectly natural to me. I had been with him just a few days before and there was an aura already about him that I felt.

That's a good point. But from early on you decided to be a poet.

Yeah. And I believed them. Yeah, I really did.

Tall, petite. You know, I just loved the sound of that word. And to her it was beautiful. And who knows why, but she thought so.

I wish I knew.

It's usually a phrase, an image. It's a rhythm more than anything else. And I've always felt that poetry begins with sounds rather than with sense. And you ride on that rhythm until your own being takes possession of it. And really, the sound and the sense combine and then you have some sense of where you're going, aside from riding on that rhythm. But, to a large degree, I think the poem is more interested in perpetuating a flow of sound than it is of producing a meaning.

Oh, they're lying around or in my manuscript collection at Princeton, which, Princeton Public Library, who took over everything in my desk.

Well, they brought, they sent a truck, and they had room and they wanted to fill the room. I gave them everthing I had.

I wouldn't want to, I don't want to. It's like looking at one's grave.

Well, not for me. I'm not even computer savvy and I don't want to be.

Well, I go from pencil to pen and then to my old, battered Hermes. How many thousand? It's called Hermes 2000, yeah. Mhm.

Well, so is poetry. Maybe that---I hadn't thought of that affinity. But obviously the springtime association is essential to understanding that.

Oh yeah, I go. But I don't walk across the bridge. I'm in a car.

Privileges of age are, I think that one has earned a certain degree of independence that one can do what one pleases. Even with one's work. And one isn't likely to be challenged in the way you are in your youth when you first publish your poems and get a response that is usually called diffidence.

You suffered from diffidence at one point. You outlived diffidence.

Yes. I don't know all of them but many of them meet me in the street and invent themselves or present themselves. Who knows what. But it's an extraordinary experience to be walking in the village here these days and the number of persons who greet you. And I don't think of myself as a public person but obviously poetry is part of the life in this village, as I guess it always has been, and it's the reason I came here in 1928, which is a long time ago.

I came to the village immediately. And in fact I found a basement apartment on 9th street between 5th and 6th. I was paying $25 a month because I was in the back room with the basement and there was a noisy tenant in the front. The noise lasted all night, and one day I pounded on the door and, much to my amazement, the door opened and there was a bartender in his white jacket and he said, "Buddy, what's the trouble?" And I said, "I'm trying to sleep, that's the trouble." And I was working, and I had an office job. And he said, "Well, I don't know what I can do about the noise, but I tell you what: anytime you want a drink,"--this is a speakeasy, of course--"just come in. I'll be glad to give you anything you like." That was our agreement, and it worked out very well. And I slept better ever after.

The Bowles? No. No, I didn't. I'm sorry, I didn't.

Cummings I knew very well. He was a good friend. And Marianne Moore was one of the first to publish me in The Dial. I've ever been grateful for her. I'll tell you another story about her.