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SPEAKER: In the last 10 or 15 years, has gone back to a situation that it was in for thousands of years, namely, that most people now prefer to hear poetry read aloud. And it's only in the last 10 or 15 years that this has returned. This was a situation in which Homer always had his poems aloud so that when you read poetry with your eye, and when you hear it with your ear, there are two separate things going on.

It isn't quite clear what is happening. One possibility is that the poetry that you read with your eye goes to your brain, which is where we like to have it in the universities. And another possibility is that when you hear it with your ear, it goes, somehow, inside here more quickly. And this is what the ancients wanted out of poetry.

They weren't opposed to the brain. They wanted the poetry to come inside them. They're more interested in feeling than we are. So I'm going to make a few remarks about feeling. One of the things you can say about poetry is that it tries to encourage more feeling from you. It tries to encourage you to feel more. As you know, in the middle west, this is not our favorite occupation.

California feels a lot but doesn't know what they're feeling about. New York feels a lot, mainly paranoia and desire to murder everyone on the subway, which is, again, a different issue. Therefore, it's right about that, David Ignatow, for example, writes about the desire to murder others on the subway with fantastic genius.

When we go through high school, we get almost no feeling. Our teachers urge us not to feel. If you have a feeling, kid, he's a troublemaker. He's clearly not a Lutheran.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

And when they teach poetry on the whole, they teach it directly out of the eye and into the brain. And it stays in the brain. And they don't want it to go down to the feelings because they have not taken poetry themselves down to their own feelings.

It's very seldom, it's almost impossible, for example, to really feel a poem, unless you memorize it yourself. If you memorize it yourself, you will find that it goes into the vocal chords, and then it gradually goes down into the body, and finally gets involved down here. So when you're walking on the road some night, it suddenly comes up out of the body, brought about by certain motions your body is making.

As you know, that's not the way poetry is taught in high school. They got this sex mad teacher up there. She made love last in 1924, and she talks about it in intellectual terms, and talks about it in terms of meter, and what the symbols mean and all of that. This is much too mental. She's doing the best she could, but she was trained in her own school.

And poetry was something which increases your intellectual ability and makes you a cultured man. Ancients did not think that way at all. Poetry is something which goes down into your body and increases your feelings. So you can say that poetry makes the feeling stronger. And then the second thing it does after it's made your feelings stronger, after you've been writing poetry for five years, you'll notice your feelings are much stronger. Then the second thing poetry will try to do is to get your brain stronger, try to get you to think more.

Yeats is somewhere along in there. You're not interested in Yeats until you've read and written poetry for some years. And your feeling is strong. Yeats's feeling was so fantastically powerful that it was with him always. And when he wanted to write a poem, then he tried to use his brain and make her think. And then finally, it can unite the poor, the brain, and the thinking in the feeling.

And if that happens, you've gone a long ways. So the ancient world always used poetry as a guide in this way, in the same way they use the ancient mysteries. And they could tell where anyone was on this scale according to how much they understood poetry and how much they felt it. The ancient Chinese used exactly the same way. One of the weirdest things out of ancient Chinese history is that whenever a man was chosen in China for a position as governor of a state, for example, governor of Minnesota, governor of Illinois, the test for it were five to six days of examinations involving poems.

And his job was to describe these poems and write criticisms of the poems. Because they understood that unless the man could understand the feelings and the poems, he would never be able to understand the feelings of the people around him in the state, and he'd be a disaster. Like Nixon.

[LAUGHTER]

Can you imagine Nixon writing an essay on a poem? Wild. Wild. But he's a perfect example of the non-feeling type that we have developed. And it isn't a disaster that he's president, because actually, he represents the country very well. Everyone is insane about money and hates feeling. Can't stand their wives. Look at Pat Nixon's face. Oh, God! It's like some wall has just been plastered before anyone painted it.

It's suffering in that face. That's suffering of a woman living with a man who despises everything female, including feeling. Feeling, after all, is kept alive in our world primarily by women because they're more intelligent than we are, in some deep way. The men are terrific for getting a goddamn jet planes off the ground. But when they're bombing people in Vietnam, they don't feel anything.

Their wives are at home in Honolulu, trying to make love with this son of bitch when he comes home. And they ask him about the war, and he says, I'd rather not talk about it. Her problem is to make love with this unfeeling murderer that she got married to in a church by a priest who said it was a divine marriage. You understand what I'm talking about?

We're all involved in it. Your primary problem is that this won't happen to you. If you're a woman, one of your major problems is to marry a man who has some feeling in him, a little, so that you can develop it and make it stronger. If you fail in either one, your life is finished. If you marry a jock with no feeling, give it up. Forget it. If you marry a man who has some feeling, and you fail to take any responsibility for him, then don't try to help him to feel. It's all over just as much.

You'll start separating like this, and it'll all be over. And men who are so unlucky that they marry a woman who can't think or who can't feel, they're finished, too. Men can't make it alone. That's one of the mysteries. , That's why they have the ancient mysteries of the Orient always connected with women, and poetry always connected with a muse, a woman. Well, there's a lot of generalizations, I got to stop.

So I'll read you a few poems. So what I want to do is to think about poetry in terms of the feelings. All right. A lot of the religious people describe the growth of feeling as a sensation of coming awake. Here's a poem by Antonio Machado. "If it is good to live, then it's better to be asleep dreaming, and best of all, mother is to awake."

"Why should we call these accidental furrows roads? Everyone who moves on walks like Jesus on the sea." You understand that poem? "Why should we call these accidental furrows roads?" Everyone who continues to grow, everyone who continues to increase his feeling and grow on in life is doing such a fantastic thing. It's exactly like Jesus walking on the sea.

Everyone who moves on, as opposed to getting stuck, moves like Jesus on the sea. Walks like Jesus on the sea. Here's another lovely poem by Antonio Machado. It's a contemporary Spanish poet. "It's good knowing that glasses are to drink from. The bad thing is not to know what thirst is for." Get that poem?

In America, we are all consumers. We all know that glasses are to drink from. We know what women are for. We've read Playboy. But the point of poetry and of spiritual life is that the most important thing in the world is thirst. Thirst for the divine. Thirst for feeling. Thirst for women. Thirst to be a better person than you are. Thirst. He says, "it's good knowing that glasses are to drink from. The bad thing is not to know what thirst is for."

Here's an American Indian poem, which is a lovely thing because you can see her going into the feeling in the third line. American Indian, this is a Chippewa poem, maybe written not many miles from here. "Sometimes, I go about pitying myself. And all the time, I am being carried on great winds across the sky."

You understand that? Self-pity is not a feeling. It's a part of our anti-feeling world. And you, yourself, often pity yourself in college. And then when you get out of college and you see how empty the life really is in this country, or any country, then you'll realize that in college, you were pitying yourself, and all the time you were being carried on great winds across the sky. And you're so dumb, you didn't know it. Right?

And then you'll pity yourself. And then you'll get married and have about six kids and be a disaster in the suburbs. And then you'll pity yourself again.

AUDIENCE: Robert?

SPEAKER: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: You must say what college you went to. Because these people will think that you've never gone to college.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

SPEAKER: Well, maybe, I didn't. How do you know?

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

SPEAKER: I went one year to Saint Olaf. Ooh! Terrific.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

It was marvelous. One of the funniest things I remember at St. Olaf, it taught me something. I'm a Norwegian Lutheran from Minnesota. My family were connected with St. Olaf. We had a whole bunch of black sheep in the family who were missionaries.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

And I went there. I had been away two years, and I came to St. Olaf and I was just a kid. And I believed half of that stuff. Then in our dormitory, there was a man who had been in the Finnish-Russian war. He'd been a photographer with the Finns. He was a Norwegian. He'd slept on his snowshoes 20 days in a row when the Russians were after him.

It was very interesting. Because the kids at St. Olaf would go down about 7 o'clock at night and sing downstairs in the lounge. There's nothing the matter with it. Except that when they sang, you knew that it was some conventional feelings they were expressing. Conventionally pious stuff they'd picked up, right? Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it disgusting.

Where is their real feeling? 1 out of 20 of those kids really felt those songs that they were singing to God. To hear a song sung to God when you really feel it as a marvelous thing. To hear 19 other St. Olaf kids singing it because they know their parents would like it, or because someone told them to sing it, that's different. That is death. Any time you express a feeling that's not deeply yours, the death enters you. You could feel a lot of death in St. Olaf. You can still feel it.

Anyway, so I remember when this would happen, this Norwegian who was about 30 years old would suddenly leap to his feet and jump up to the transom and slam that thing as hard as he could. And sit down again. Because, actually, he had felt emotion. He knew what it was like to be a Finn and be pursued by the Russians and see your friends murdered and see all of this happen. He knew what hate was like, and he knew what intense love was like, and he couldn't stand it when these St. Olaf kids started babbling their little Christian songs. You follow me what I'm saying?

We're not mocking St. Olaf. We're talking about the habit we all have, and we get it all the way through. I had it all the way, all the way. I never had one sincere feeling all the way through high school. What did Hemingway say? You have to be a writer for 10 years before you're able to see which of the feelings you're expressing are really yours. The rest of the time is your writing, it is imitating other writers.

You figure, I'm with this woman. Now, it would be a wonderful thing if I loved her. So I'll write this poem that I love her, see? You figure what the appropriate emotion is, and then you feel it. If you want to see the reason for bad writing, you see it again and again. And the point is not to do that. If necessary, just to say, no, I don't I don't love you. I really don't. You know that? I'm an egotist and male maniac.

I want to drive a jet plane. I want to go to the football game. I'm just with you. While the women all get those messages. They get them every night, so why not be frank and say it? The women feel have much more feeling in high school than the boys do, and often, much more honest. And they say to a boy, do you love me? Oh, well, I didn't know. I really think Vikings are going to win next Saturday, don't you think so?

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

So therefore, poetry cannot be a poem, unless it breaks through that business of what we think is the accepted feeling. And therefore, when you see old ladies writing these sonnets, they're so wonderful about how the sunset reminds them of a picture postcard, and all that. And how it's true that all their children, one died under a tractor, and another one was run over, and four were killed by horses, and her husband died of cancer, and everything. But they say, you know, it's really life. It's really beautiful, and God intended all this.

She doesn't really feel that last emotion. It's an appropriate emotion. She figured it'd be nice to put in the poem. Do you understand what I'm saying? I'm not attacking old ladies. I'm not saying anything like that. Because I've gone all through this stuff.

When anyone starts to write, all your emotions come out totally false for like 10 years. You see, I put out my first book in 1962. I was-- I was born in '26. How old was I? 30-- 36? Probably should have waited a few more years when I'm too good

Anyway, that's the problem. That's one of the problems we have. And now when everything is speeding up, everyone is urging the kids to write when they're 20. Come on, you're 22 and you haven't published a book yet. You call yourself a poet?

The feeling is different something else. DH Lawrence knew a lot about feeling. Here's a poem of his that I think is fantastically beautiful, and it talks about the time when we still have feeling when we're children. We usually have feeling until we're 5 or 6. In some boys, it lasts until 8 or 9. Then it's killed.

Schools get it. Again, don't blame the schools. They're just representing all of us. Here's the poem "The White Horse."

"The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on.

And the horse looks at him in silence.

They are so silent, they are in another world."

Does it mean anything to you?

When a boy is 8 or 9 and standing next to a horse, his ego, his masking an ego hasn't come up yet. All that false stuff that your parents lay on you hasn't come up yet. And when he's standing next to the horse, who is all feeling, he goes right into the horse. And suddenly the horse comes right into him.

Happens a lot with girls even up the age of 14 to 15. That's why they love to ride horses.

"The youth walks up to the white horse, to put his halter on.

And the horse looks at him in silence.

They are so silent, they are in another world."

So the strangest thing is that feeling is often expressed by silence. And that's what's so mysterious about a poetry reading, because most of the feelings that I have, I have in silence alone. And then what happens? I have to get up here and babble? See the point? [CHUCKLES]

As soon as I leave here, I won't be able to feel a feeling for maybe 24 hours or 36 hours, because talking feeling kills them. Well, getting off the subject. I got to make a living in some way, you know?

All right. Here's another, here's a poem by an Arab that's lovely. "In this world of infinite possibilities, I look around for the second step of desire. All I see is one footprint." You get that poem?

Your friends in high school that seemed so terrific, see them 20 years from now. That step that they took in high school was the biggest step they ever took. And you look at them now, and nothing. It's just like walking along the beach and seeing one footprint and never a second, never a third, never a fourth, never a fifth that's what's so incredible.

In the Middle West and all over, you talk to people 40 years old, you know what they talk about mainly? Their high school experiences. That was the last time they were really alive. "In this world of infinite possibilities, I look around for the second step of desire. All I see is one footprint."

All right. I'll read a couple others. Here's a Walt Whitman poem. Walt Whitman knew how to stay inside a feeling. He was in the Civil War and he saw some bodies lying there. And notice how this poem will stay-- and it's only four lines. It'll stay in the feeling line after line.

"Look down, fair moon, and bathe this scene.

Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple.

On the dead on their backs with arms stretched wide,

Throw down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon."

You could just feel it go right through you. Ah.

All right. I'll read you a couple of tiny poems by the Japanese. The Japanese are mostly Buddhists. And here's a little Japanese poet named Issa, who is a very devout Buddhist. And in the Buddhist, if you-- how many of you have ever read Buddhist things or thought about them? A few.

The Buddhists, of course, believe that all progress in human life comes through meditation, through sitting. It's impossible to make any progress any other way. Christianity is the only religion in the world in which there is no provision for meditation.

The reason for that is that your feelings are killed by the amount of social pressure that comes on you from all sides. It happens in every nation. And one way to get rid of that is to go into silence and sit by yourself.

And then those wounded feelings that have been in ever since your parents spoke crossly to you or your friends were mean to you and wouldn't choose you for the baseball team, all of those wounded feelings start to come up when you're sitting. And that's one reason why even weather silly things like transcendental meditation and other things are making tremendous progress in this country.

A fantastic number of kids doing meditation because it's one way in a country that hates feeling to allow your own feelings to grow slightly. So all Buddhism is involved with the growth of feeling. And then-- so here are some haikus written by Issa.

And here's one of his little poems. "Insects, why cry? We all go that way." Get that poem? One of the things that we hate most in the United States to recognize is the fact that we're going to die. We're all going to die.

We're going to go under the ground. And they're going to dump it on top of us, and that's it. And you know how much we hate it because the way we paint the faces of the dead. There's this fantastic fear. And Issa says, "Insects, why cry? We all go that way."

Here's his most beautiful poem. He's lying in bed and the cricket's in bed with him. And he writes this lovely poem. "Cricket, be careful. I'm rolling over."

[LAUGHTER]

Now, you understand where the feeling comes into this poem? In this case, it's humorous. But surely, we understand that if we had our typical American or English male and he were in bed with a cricket, hm? Why, you'll squash them. Call up the motel, get this goddamn cricket out of here.

[LAUGHTER]

Every Japanese knows this wonderful poem of Issa's. "Cricket, be careful. I'm rolling over." And you think it's easy to write a poem like that. But the fact is, what is so amazing is the incredible unselfishness of Issa in even being able to think such a thought.

The next time you're alone with a cricket, try to take the cricket's side. It won't even occur to you. You're a human being, and he's a cricket. And that is it.

A friend of mine, David Ray, was giving a reading one time somewhere. And the faculty took him off for dinner beforehand. And he was about to sit down at the table, and there was a couple of flies in the room. And the faculty wife took a can of Black Flag and started going [SWISHING] cham, cham, cham, cham, cham, cham, cham everywhere, you know?

And there's a cricket, and it's up on the wall and everything. And so all this stuff was drifting all over the food and everything. And so David said, well, I-- [CLEARS THROAT] I'm really not hungry. I think I'll go downtown. Take a walk.

And anyway, he says, why do you want to kill the crickets? But their my crickets, I'll kill them if I want to. What a wonderful idea. She owned the crickets. Terrific. There's a wonderful male ego in a woman. They are my crickets. I'll kill them if I want to.

So anyway, he said, the Japanese love crickets. And they write poems about them. And she said, well, these weren't Japanese crickets.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, I'll read a few more of these. He was going through the woods, and he saw a little frog and a skinny frog-- one big frog and one skinny frog fighting. And he wrote this little poem. "Lanky frog, hold your ground. Issa is coming." Isn't that beautiful, to have so much unselfishness you try to interfere and help some skinny frog? Fantastic.

Here's a poem for Agnew. "Why mention people? Even the scarecrows are crooked."

[LAUGHTER]

He was-- one time, he was-- he put some watermelons in the tub to cool. And he thought, well, I'll go away. I'm going to go away, and some boys will steal them. I know they will. So he wrote this little poem. "Now, listen you, watermelons. If any thieves come, turn into frogs."

[LAUGHTER]

And another one of his great poems I love is the one about the old dog bending his head. You know this poem? Anyone ever heard this poem? You seen a dog with his head bent like this, listening? He doesn't have his arms up, I do. The dog isn't.

A dog with his head bent, what's the dog listening for? In a poem, what is necessary is that you give the fact. And then if it's going to be a poem, there's this terrific leap. Boom, like that.

So if you saw a dog standing like that and you were to write the poem, how would you finish it? The old dog bends his head listening. What's he listening for? Who will give me a guess? Hm? There's no right answer or wrong answer. We can write 25 poems out of this.

The old dog bends his head listening. What's he listening for?

AUDIENCE: Rabbits on the third floor.

ROBERT BLY: Rabbits on the third floor?

[LAUGHTER]

That's a poem, the third part of the poem. I don't know. That's not bad. Who else wants to make a guess?

AUDIENCE: Seventh floor.

ROBERT BLY: Hm?

[LAUGHTER]

He's been in New York, even in the seventh floor, no? Who else wants to make a guess? The old dog bends his head listening. Hm? Come on.

AUDIENCE: Master's footsteps.

ROBERT BLY: Hm?

AUDIENCE: His master's footsteps.

ROBERT BLY: Be careful when you get married because your tendency to admire men too much.

[LAUGHTER]

Yeah, you follow me when I say, too many women listening for their master's footsteps?

AUDIENCE: Toe of his master's--

ROBERT BLY: Hm? The toe of his master's boot, there's a vicious one. All right. Anybody else want to make a guess here? It's true, dogs do have masters. But it isn't quite clear if they're listening for them. I don't know.

Anyone else want to make a guess on this? Food? What do you think he's listening for? Hm.

AUDIENCE: Dog whistle.

AUDIENCE: The man--

AUDIENCE: Stomach growling.

ROBERT BLY: Stomach growling, dog whistle, yeah.

AUDIENCE: The creak of the can opener.

ROBERT BLY: [LAUGHS] There's a city type.

[LAUGHTER]

Sometimes someone says, listening for the sound of his own heartbeat, which indicates a certain inwardness. Everything we say indicates where we are somehow.

AUDIENCE: Dogs only listen for one thing.

ROBERT BLY: What?

AUDIENCE: Two things.

[LAUGHTER]

The first one is thunder.

ROBERT BLY: Thunder?

AUDIENCE: Tell me the second.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

ROBERT BLY: All right. The old dog-- that's what Issa said. "The old dog bends his head listening. I guess the singing of the earthworms gets to him."

[LAUGHTER]

You follow me? What makes a poet even to imagine earthworms as singing is fantastic, fantastic. And somehow he senses how much joy there is in the world, which none of us sensed when we gave an answer. But he sensed it, that something is singing.

Something is singing somewhere. And we heard so much television we can't pick it up anymore. Well, I think I'll read-- I'm supposed to read some poems of my own. I'd better do it or they won't pay me someone.

Someone asked me to read a poem called "Driving Toward Lac Qui Parle--" "Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River." I'd been staying down by Rochester, trying to sell a friend's house that no one wanted to buy. And I had to sleep on the floor for a week in a scary house, in which robbers were about to come any minute and steal all my poems and murder me. So I was scared.

And then after a week, I went home, still not having talked to anybody for a week. And then for the first time after having talked to no one for a week, I suddenly could feel the Minnesota landscape, which I'd been in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.

And this is a little poem just describing driving from Minneapolis and Highway 7 to Willmar and then to Lac Qui Parle and Milan and then to Madison. And it takes us to the Lac Qui Parle River.

"Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River"

"I am driving, it is dusk; Minnesota.

The stubble field catches the last growth of sun.

The soybeans are breathing on all sides.

Old men are sitting before their houses on car seats

In the small towns. I am happy.

The moon rising above the turkey sheds.

The small world of the car

Plunges through the deep fields of the night

On the way from Willmar to Milan.

This solitude, covered with iron,

Moves through the fields of night

Penetrated by the noise of crickets.

Nearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge,

And water kneeling in the moonlight.

In small towns, the houses are built right in the ground.

The lamplight falls on all fours in the grass.

When I reach the river, a full moon covers it.

A few people are talking low in a boat."

So most poems are written at the very moment it's happening to you because that's the only time you know what you're feeling is. So I wrote this poem standing on the bridge over by Milan. And I didn't know how to end it.

I got down to where it said, "The lamplight falls on all fours in the grass." That's driving through Milan, and you see the light coming out of the windows and they're broken into four. Look down on the grass.

And then, "When I reached the river, the full moon covers it." Well, that's a pretty good line. But there was only five in that stanza, and I needed six.

[LAUGHTER]

So I couldn't figure out how to-- I knew the poem was over because as soon as I got out of the car to write it down, the mood is gone. So I either finished it now or not at all. And so I heard a few people underneath the bridge in a boat, a couple of fishermen talking. And I wrote a rather poor line, "A few people are talking low in a boat."

And thinking about it later-- and it ends a poem in some way, moderately. Thinking about it later, I realized that the reason that this happened to me probably, and I picked that, is because I'd been alone for a week. And the sound of the human voice was precious to me.

And when I heard those people talking down there, it was wonderful. If I'd been talking to people that whole week, I wouldn't even notice it. That's noise, noise, noise. I would never finished the poem at all probably.

Well, I'll read a few more. Do you want to hear a few more of these? These are mostly set around Madison, "Poem in Three Parts." I was living then-- I mucked around. I went to college for a while. And then I lived in New York for about three years.

And then-- and then I got thin and skinny and tubercular and pneumonic and things like that. And finally, I went back to a farm in Madison and lived there with my wife, whom I just married. And for the first time in my life, I-- I could-- I had something to eat. And I mean, since I was in college.

And I could also had lots of time. I decided not to be a success and not to be a teacher but just to be a freak living near Madison. And everybody in Madison said, we don't need you, kid. Why don't you go and be a freak in some other town?

[LAUGHTER]

When I started talking about the Vietnam war, they said, look, we don't even need-- leftist freaks especially, we don't need. Anyway, but I didn't mind. My wife and I never left the farm. People would tell us this three, four months afterwards. [CHUCKLES] And we have lovely neighbors, and we have a terrific time. We hardly ever go into town.

"Poem in Three Parts," so here's a poem I wrote for the first time I was able to sleep until 10:00 or 11:00 at night.

"Oh, on an early morning, I think I shall live forever.

I am wrapped in my joyful flesh

As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green.

Rising from a bed, where I dreamed

Of long rides past castles and hot coals.

The sun lies happily on my knees.

I have suffered and survived the night

Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass.

The strong leaves of the box elder trees

Plunging in the wind call us to disappear

Into the wilds of the universe,

Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant

And live forever like the dust."

Do you understand that poem at the end? Really comes out of my reading in Buddhism. The Buddhists said, it isn't necessary for you human beings to kneel in front of a huge 200-foot altar. Find a blade of grass and kneel in front of that. That's where this line came from. "Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant and live forever," not like the angels, "like the dust."

Hm. Well, you want to hear a couple of horse poems? I'll read you a poem called at "A Funeral of Great-Aunt Mary" since it touches on things we're talking about. I think I read it when I was here a couple of years ago.

Again, we're talking about the problem of feeling in the Middle West. And I went to a funeral, it was a great aunt of mine who was born in Bellingham, Minnesota and died in Dawson. And I went there with my mother.

And I put on a suit. I hadn't worn a suit for three to four months. I went to the church, and I was very struck. I said it was weird. Everyone's dressed up, because someone has died? Weird. That's where the first line came from.

Then I saw my great aunt lying up there, about 75, in the coffin. And that's a serious thing, a dead body in a coffin, very serious. And then I heard the minister, a young man, begin to talk saying all sorts of things that he didn't believe, such as we all rejoice at death. And you could tell from the tone in his voice he didn't believe it.

They told him at Augsburg Seminary to say it. But he didn't believe it. And it isn't true. We don't rejoice at death. We grieve at death. Maybe Christ rejoiced to death, and a great Christian rejoices to death. But we don't.

And then another thing that happens. In an effort to prevent us from feeling, the undertaker is more and more won't lower the body during the funeral. And they leave it hanging up there. You know that whole scene, with plastic grass down. That's all feeling killing stuff. Undertaker is terrific in killing feeling, just terrific.

The result is that Americans go through a funeral and don't weep. And then they're emotionally upset for three to four months afterwards. I remember I was giving a reading one time in Queens College a couple of years ago. And I was reading some poems in the Vietnam war.

I read a little poem. It was a poem about counting up the little bodies that we used to do so much. I'll read you the little poem. "250 Vietnamese bodies found today. 75 found yesterday, not quite so good yesterday.

Let's count the bodies over again.

If we could only make the bodies smaller,

The size of skulls,

We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight.

If we could only make the bodies smaller,

Maybe we could get

A whole year's kill in front of us on a desk.

If we could only make the body smaller,

We could fit

A body into a finger ring for a keepsake forever."

That's all we did with the bodies in the end, wasn't it? Wonder what good did it do? Nothing. We made little wings out of them. Anyway, I read this poem. And there was a group like this at Queens College. And one girl in the-- I was reading some other poems in the war. And one girl was crying.

So I stopped the reading. And I said, wow. You're the only one in the room crying. And I said, where are you from? I thought she'd say Carolina or something. She said Guatemala. Oh, Christ. The one woman from South America in the room is crying, and the Americans are all stony-faced. Boy, they don't cry.

The women are almost crying-- not a man, even a trace of it here. So you see the issue we're talking about? How come they cry in other countries but not in this one? This is the same issue we're going over and over and over again.

How come we paint the bodies of the dead, the faces? How come we put plastic grass on them? Well, let me read this poem, "At the Funeral of Great-Aunt Mary."

"Here we are, all dressed up to honor death.

No, it's not that.

It's to honor this old woman

Born in Bellingham.

The church windows are open to the green trees.

The minister tells us that, being

The sons and daughters of God,

We rejoice at death for we go

To the mansions prepared

From the foundations of the Earth.

Impossible. No one believes it.

Out in the bare, pioneer field,

The frail body must wait till dusk

To be lowered

In the hot and sandy earth."

As you get older, you'll realize how much you would like to die surrounded by your friends, how much you would like to have them there when you're lowered into the ground. Well, we can't allow that. Well, that's the poem. Mm.

I'll read you another poem here. Let's get off this one. I'll read you another poem. It's connected in some way. I don't know how. I was living out in California a couple of years ago with my wife and family. I have four children.

And we were living out in the beach. And there was the oil spill out there. Do you remember that oil spill a couple of years ago out in San Francisco when the oil came in from the tankers? And the kids from San Francisco came out and worked like mad.

They worked three and four nights cleaning the birds, cleaning the water off, working all night and day. We gave them sandwiches. And they saved all the shellfish in the Bolinas Lagoon. And they saved a lot of the birds.

I went out about two weeks later, and I saw a dead seal lying on the shore. And what happens is that the oil derivatives get in the liver of the seals and the sea lions. And they die. There's nothing can be done for them, even the Rangers couldn't do anything.

So this is just a little prose poem. When you write a prose poem, you don't bother breaking the lines. You just write it as if it were prose. And I wrote this on a little slip of paper I had with me when I saw the thing.

"The Dead Seal at McClure's Beach"

"Walking north toward the point, I come on a dead seal. From a few feet away, he looks like a brown log. The body is on its back, dead only a few hours. I stand and look at him. There's a quiver in the dead flesh. My god, he's still alive. And a shock goes through me as if a wall of my room had fallen away.

The head is arched back, the small eyes closed, and the whiskers sometimes rise and fall. He is dying. This is the oil. Here on its back is the oil that heats our houses so efficiently. Wind blows fine sand back with the ocean.

The flipper near me lies folded over the stomach, looking like an unfinished arm lightly glazed with sand at the edges. The other flipper lies half underneath. And the seal skin looks like an old overcoat, scratched here and there by sharp muscle shells maybe.

I reach out and touch him. Suddenly, he rears up, turns over. He gives three cries, ah, ah, ah, like the cries from Christmas toys. And he lunges toward me. I'm terrified and leap back, although I know there can be no teeth in that jaw. He starts flopping toward the sea. But he falls over on his face.

He does not want to go back to the sea. He looks up at the sky. And he looks like an old lady who has lost her hair. He puts his chin back down in the sand, arranges his flippers, and waits for me to go. I go.

The next day, I come back to say goodbye. He's dead now. But he's not. He's a quarter mile farther up the shore. Today, he's thinner, squatting on his stomach, head out. The ribs show more. Each vertebrae on the back under the coat is now visible, shiny. He breathes in and out. He raises himself up and tucks his flippers under, as if to keep them warm.

A wave comes in, touches his nose. He turns and looks at me. The eye is slanted. The crown of his head looks like a leather jacket. He's taking a long time to die. The whiskers, white as porcupine quills, the forehead slopes.

Goodbye, brother. Die in the sound of waves. Forgive us if we have killed you. Long live your race, your inner tube race, so uncomfortable on land, so comfortable in the ocean.

Be comfortable in death, then, when the sand will be out of your nostrils and you can swim in long loops through the pure death, ducking under as assassinations break above you. You don't want to be touched by me. I climb the cliff and go home the other way." Hm.

And you understand what we're-- how you-- yeah, there's no need to say anything. One of the problems we have in feeling is that if we start to feel, we'll also feel for all the animals that we're murdering. But in the end, we prefer our oil above the sea lions.

We prefer the Honeywell thermostat keeping the house at 90 or 72. We prefer that to the whales and the eagles and all of those. And insofar as we do that, man, we're not even alive. You can't even say we're alive.

[CHATTERING]

I think what I'll do is read a poem by James Stephens. So I found the other day. Ad you understand, poetry can be read in any number of different ways. It can be mumbled or it can be spoken as far as possible from inside. We still don't read poetry well. The Russians read it much better than we do. Spanish read it better, too.

Now, here's a poem by James Stephens in which he wanted to experiment with this way of reading it. There's a little note here that says, the letters marked with an accent are to be prolonged for as long as it's possible to sound them.

This may be the way it was read in ancient times, Yeats thought so. It's a little poem called "His Will."

(CHANTING) "He wills to be alone With thee.

A stone, a stream, a sky, a tree, It is his dream to be alone with these and thee."

Hm. I see, I can't do it with my Minnesota accent. But wouldn't it be beautiful if people spoke that way so you could feel how much feeling there was in them? Hm.

Shall I recite a poem of Yeats's? Want to hear a Yeats poem? This is a poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." It's one of the few that's recorded by Yeats. He always said that he was trying to read it as ancient people did.

There's a wonderful exchange when he was reading in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Yeats said, I am going to read my poems in the way all great poets have read them since the time of Homer. And this woman says, Madam-- I mean, she said, Mr. Yeats, how do you have the gall to say that you know how Homer read his poems?

And he said something like, well, Madam, I can only say, as a Scotsman said when he said that Shakespeare was a Scotsman, the ability of the man justifies the assumption.

[LAUGHTER]

So here's his poem. He loved the Isle of Innisfree, and he was in London walking down the street when he saw a little fountain bubbling a little water. It reminded him of the Lakeshore. And this is a very bad imitation of his reading.

"I will arise and go now--" he was tone deaf, by the way. And he slid up scales and didn't pick up the notes.

(CHANTING) "I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree

And a small cabin built there of clay and the wattles made

Nine bean rows, will I have there and a hive for the honey bee

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings,

Where midnights all a glimmer and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore

While I stand on the roadway or on the pavements gray,

I hear it in the deep heart's core." Hm.

[APPLAUSE]

So as you can see, in America, we really-- it's difficult for us to read poetry. When I first began reading poetry, I mumbled. And I was scared to death of the audience in the first place. And I looked down at my book and just read straight on.

But that's not the way to do it. It's more exciting to read it than to hear something like that. So lately, I've been trying to scream in rage. But we can't come anywhere near the Yeats or the Irish in general since they are not as-- well, you understand.

What would you like me to read? Would you like me to read a few new poems?

[AUDIO CUT]

I'll read a few poems that are in this Dakota Territory, which comes out here, wonderful magazine, one of the best in the country. And this new one had just come out. And I gave them a few poems. Tom wrote to me and-- in the summer, I don't write much so I just had some not much good stuff lying around. But I said, Tom, it's all I got. And he said, I'll take it. I'll take it.

[LAUGHTER]

So this is one written about August or so.

"The third week moon reaches a light over my father's farm,

Half of it is gone now, in the west that eats it away.

The earth has rocks in it that hum at early dawn.

As I turn to go in, I see my shadow reach for the latch."

Here's a little poem "December," written last year. It's a wonderful feeling on the night of a basketball games in small towns. About 7 o'clock at night, you can feel the excitement about a mile and a half out of town, which is where we live, all the girls getting ready and everybody-- and the boys [GRUNTS] And thinking about it afterwards-- and the whole scene is there.

"December"

"More snow coming and a basketball game tonight,

Horns heard from the town a mile away,

Girls taking their hair out of curlers

And the flakes come sideways through the confident twigs in near dusk."

Here's a little poem about being in a room.

"November"

"The spider disappears over the side of the Yellow Book,

Like a door into a room never used."

I couldn't get that. I saw a book of mine and I saw a spider go toom over the edge. And it reminded me of opening a door like one that the hired man used to live in, which would be completely black and dark. But I was never able to solve the last line.

"Like a door into a room that's dark," you put "dark" in a poem, the poem is over. So you got any ideas? The spider disappears over the side of the book. It's something final, boy, when he disappears, like a door into a room never used, like a door into a room where some dead person has been, hm?

Maybe that's better. Is that better?

AUDIENCE: No.

ROBERT BLY: No.

[LAUGHTER]

It's like a door-- like opening a door into a room where there's no light at all, no electric light or anything. It's not worth it thinking about it that long. Here's another little love poem.

[LAUGHTER]

I was out for a walk one night. And as always, the men are out for walks and the women are washing dishes, you know? Love poem.

"It was when walking at night in the stubble,

I said, I will go home and help you,

That I felt a poem hidden in the winter grass."

This was the poem that was hidden there, huh? Found it. Well, you want to hear a couple of poems from a new book called Jumping Out of Bed, which Tom hasn't seen yet?

Jumping Out of Bed, I-- I did Sleepers Joining Hands. Then a month later, I did Jumping Out of Bed. I hadn't noticed a connection between the titles at all.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, shall I read a few more minutes? What would you like?

AUDIENCE: Read.

ROBERT BLY: OK. Here's Jumping Out of Bed. It has a quote from the beginning from the Tao Te Ching.

"All around me, men are working.

But I am stubborn and take no part.

The main difference is this,

I prize the breasts of the Mother."

And whenever you have a man who is interested in feeling, you know you have a man who is interested in the mother as opposed to the father. Accountants, jet fighter pilots, economists, most politicians-- all those are strong father types. Father doesn't care about feeling. Control is what he wants.

So what happens in history is that the great mother goddesses live in the Orient and people feel fantastically much more than they do now. Look at the ancient art and compare it to the slug that's on our walls of our museums. Tremendous feeling in Egyptian art, Assyrian art, Babylonian art, ancient art, Greek art-- fantastic, thinking, too.

And then the men can't stand it. And eventually, they kill the mother, destroy all of her priests, burn down all of her temples, and put up a male god, Christ, on a rectangular cross. The mother was always round. It was a round circle. Then when they put up the cross, it means anti-woman

And the Mediterranean is so full of the mother that the Virgin Mary comes in anyway and stays there in Catholicism. But most of us are not Catholics. We are Protestants from Northern Europe, the most insane people of all.

[LAUGHTER]

And we can't even stand having a Virgin Mary there, so we get-- we hire this guy named Luther, who claims it's all got something to do with paying taxes. And we--

[LAUGHTER]

And we get totally rid of the mother.

[APPLAUSE]

And now-- and now, what have you got? You've got these churches all around us. I go to one in Madison, absolutely and totally dead, not a trace of feeling in the sermons, the liturgy, anything. You can't have feeling when the mother has been killed. All you have is wonderful big churches that people from the father types from Sioux Falls come over and put up $150,000.

AUDIENCE: Why do you go there?

ROBERT BLY: Hm?

AUDIENCE: Why'd you go there?

ROBERT BLY: Well, I'm a friend of the minister's

[LAUGHTER]

And I talked to him once in a while and tried to see if anything ever perks through, but it never does. Also, another answer that's not really an honest answer either, another answer is that the liturgy, even though it's spoken without feeling, carries in it fantastic mysteries.

And when you learn to read poetry, you learn to read underneath the words. And in the same way when you hear liturgy, you can also hear the underneath thing. So sometimes I do that. But I come home depressed every Sunday.

I say, I'm never going to do it again. I'm never going to that place again. It's this absolute nothing. How can human beings they live for 20,000 years, 40,000, evolving to end up with this on Sunday morning as the example of their spiritual life? Man, it wasn't worth it. They should have died in the caves, just committed suicide.

[LAUGHTER]

Oh, it's terrible in high school, you're so horny about the girl and the boy next door, you don't notice what's going on. But later on, oh, man. Get your sanity back and [GRUNTS]

[LAUGHTER]

Anyway, haven't you all felt it? It's terrible. Why don't people get up and say, I can't stand it! Say something original, just one thing, will you? Just say one thing, please.

[LAUGHTER]

They don't do it.

[APPLAUSE]

And they get the local man to get up and read the wonderful wild things Christ is saying, insane stuff. And it's read as if it were the financial report of the local elevator.

[LAUGHTER]

When you study the words of Christ, especially in the new fifth gospel that has been found called the Gospel of Thomas, it is the basis for the sayings quoted in Mark, Matthew Luke, and John. It's been lost for 1,900 years. And it was found in the sands of desert-- of the desert of Egypt.

The Gospel of Thomas has nothing but sayings. And when you read those sayings of Christ, you are reading an extremely intense and wild man with an awful lot of connections with Buddhist and Oriental thought. It's a very frightening experience to read the Gospel of Thomas.

And the church is dead set against it, absolutely and totally. They won't even teach it in the seminaries, though it's recognized as the fifth gospel. One of the reasons is because the complete version of some of the statements appears.

At the one point when the Pharisees and Sadducees and so on are trying to get Christ, they say to him-- it's exactly like in South Vietnam a few years ago. Someone comes up and say, should we pay taxes to the Americans? If you say yes, you think. If you say no, we shouldn't pay tax to the Americans, they report to General Westmoreland and he kills you.

That's the choice Christ had. They said to him, shall we pay taxes to Caesar? He says, well, let me see that coin you got there. They show him the coin, and he says, whose picture is on this coin? They say Caesar's. He says, give to Caesar's what is Caesar's, and give to God's what is God's.

But the whole story appears in the Gospel of Thomas. What he said was, give to Caesar's what is Caesar's, and give to God's what is God's, and give to me what is mine. That's scary.

It's known, for example, that Christ never refers to himself as the Son of God for 150 years after the Gospels begin. Those are late things. He refers to themselves as Son of Man, which was a religious position in [INAUDIBLE] Monastery as they now know. The highest position in [INAUDIBLE] Monastery was called the Son of Man, filled only every 500 years. So Christ comes out, and he says, I am the Son of Man.

Anyway, it's all very scary, fantastic things happening in Christian discovery. And all of it muffled, not a one thing of all of this will appear in any church in Madison or in Minnesota. It would revitalize the entire Christian church if they could go back again and see what Christ was saying and the issues involved. The whole thing would have to be rethought by everyone.

But as we know, we don't do that. And we are caretaker of civilization. We've promised to pass Christianity on to some mythical people in the future, mummified. They're not going to want it. Starts-- well, you understand. All right.

"All around me, men are working.

But I am stubborn, and take no part.

The main difference is this,

I prize the breast of the Mother"

That's from Tao Te Ching. And here's a four lines from the Old Testament from the Book of Job. And when the men got them, they changed them. I'll read you the original version when the women had it. "I came out of the mother naked, and I'll be naked when I return. The mother gave and the mother takes away. I love the mother."

It's not a big point but you know how that appears in Job. "I came out of the mother naked, and I'll be naked when I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." There is a clear case in which the male rewriting doesn't work at all because it doesn't follow from the image at all.

So what is happening is that we're going back much more to the mother now. Protestantism is over, in my opinion. And the whole male culture has failed. And the only question is how fast we will go back.

And the question for you is whether you will go back into the laziness and lack of discipline of the old mother culture or whether you will go back into the spirituality and intensity and feeling of it. It isn't clear yet. There's more religious life in this country among kids your age than there has been for a hundred years.

So it would appear that they will go forward into the spirit, into meditation, and into what we call Buddhist thought and so on. On the other hand, there has never been so many slobby kids listening to rock records, smoking grass and slobbing around, won't go to a demonstration, too lazy, don't feel enough.

You think that by listening to rock records and smoking grass, you'll be saved from the father? Unh-unh. Father loves people who don't feel anything. The more you smoke grass, the less you'll feel. I guarantee it.

And we know that the less-- the more you slob around in school and don't do your work, the less you're going to feel. And then the father's got you, doesn't even have to support you. You understand what I'm saying?

It's all very vague and everything. But we feel this terrific danger. We feel your generation is terrific danger because both sides are very appealing, both the slob side and the high spiritual side. Well, we're talking tonight Abbie Hoffman has put up for $500,000 for a cocaine sale. Ooh. It's clear which side he went.

It appeared he was on the other side because he had some feeling a few years ago. You sell $500,000 worth of cocaine, you have no feeling. You should have seen the letters that came into Wind magazine from people in prison. It's when they put out an appeal for Abbie, when I went, that's-- I'll read you a poem called "Thinking of the Autumn Fields," written by a Chinaman and adapted by me.

I'll read three or four more and then we'll stop at 3:15. I wrote this in Norway.

"Already autumn begins here in the mossy rocks.

The sheep bells moving from the wind are sad.

I have left my wife foolishly in a flat country.

I have set up my table looking over a valley.

There are fish in the lake, but I will not fish.

I will sit silently at my table by the window.

From whatever appears on my plate,

I will give a little away to the birds and the grass.

How easy to see the road that the liferiver takes.

How hard to move one living thing from its own path.

The fish adores being in the deep water.

The bird easily finds a tree to live in.

In the second half of life, a man accepts poverty and illness.

Praise and blame belong to the glory of the first half,

Although cold wind blows against my walking stick,

I will never get tired of the ferns on this mountain.

Music and chanting help me overcome my faults.

The mountains and woods keep my body fiery.

I have two or three books only in my room.

The sun shining off the empty bookcase warms my back.

Going out, I pick up the pine cones that the wind has thrown away.

When night comes, I will open a honeycomb

On the floor throw covered with tiny red and blue flowers,

I bring my stocking feet close to the faint incense."

Here's another little poem. In helping yourself develop feeling, one of the most important things is to be alone. I belong to a group called three-day people, in which we agreed to be alone three days every week. In a country with this amount of television and this amount of brutality, it's very difficult to keep your feeling alive without something like that.

We agree to stay alone three days a week. I have a little shack that I go to, where I am alone for three days. We send each other little books and poems and things like this. Here is when I was driving up to my shack one time.

The Buddhists say, don't try to live like the full moon and get $25,000 job. When you take the Buddhist vow, you say, like the new moon, I will live my life that no one notices in the sky. So the poem is called "Like The New Moon, I Will Live My Life."

"When your privacy is beginning over,

How beautiful the things are that you didn't notice before.

A few sweet clover plants along the road to Bellingham--" I'm thinking of those beautiful yellow things that come up. I didn't get the word yellow in there but it's when they blossom for two or three weeks and scattered along.

"A few sweet clover plants along the road to Bellingham,

culvert ends poking out of driveways,

wooden corncribs slowly collapsing,

what no one loves, no one rushes toward or shouts about,

what lives like the new moon

and the wind

blowing against the rumps of grazing cows.

Telephone wires stretched across water,

the drowning sailor standing at the foot of his mother's bed,

Grandfathers and grandsons sitting together."

Do you understand that image just before the end of the drowning sailor? Many times in the Second World War, a woman would be sleeping in her bed and suddenly her son, in a sailor uniform, would appear. She'd wake up and see him standing there, just like this.

He'd look at her for like 20 seconds, and then he'd disappear. And then she'd write down the time. And it turns out that's the moment that he had drowned. So when you die, you have energy enough evidently for one thing like this. And that's a form of communication.

"Telephone wires stretched across water,

a drowning sailor standing at the foot of his mother's bed,

Grandfathers and grandsons sitting together."

I'll read you a couple little love poems maybe. There's a little love poem about-- I wrote about taking the hands of a woman, when so much goes on that you don't notice because your brain is too thick.

"Taking the hands of someone you love,

You see they are delicate cages.

Tiny birds are singing in the secluded prairies

And in the deep valleys of the hand."

I read that again?

"Taking the hands of someone you love,

You see they are delicate cages.

Tiny birds are singing in the secluded prairies

And in the deep valleys of the hand."

Here's another little poem. I was driving home, I was in love with a woman. And I passed the little town of Cosmos, which is sort of the end of the world. But if you are in love, everything looks terrific, even Cosmos.

[LAUGHTER]

"When we are in love, we love the grass

And the barns and the light poles

And the small main streets abandoned all night."

I don't know why that's a poem. It must be that when you're in love, somehow there's something inside of you that's sort of abandoned or cleaned out like a street at night. I don't know. I don't understand it at all.

"When we are in love, we love the grass

and the barns and the light poles

And the small main streets abandoned all night."

Hm. Would you like to hear a little poem I wrote over by Bemidji. I'm on my way over to Walker now tomorrow, where I have a little shack. And I'm going to be alone about a week there. And I walk around sometimes.

And I was over there one time, walking around. And I was doing some meditation, some sitting, in the middle of a road going around the lake because it was the only dry place. And I thought a tourist car from Chicago was going to come and kill me any minute. And you can notice it. You notice it in this poem, there's a little fear in here.

"On the Moonlit Road in the North Woods."

I sit in the forest road,

cross-legged.

I am an oyster

Breathing on his own shore."

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS]

ROBERT BLY: You like that?

[LAUGHTER]

"Cars seldom use this road.

I looked up and down,

No car coming, none would,

Perhaps for hours.

[LAUGHTER]

All day my thoughts ran on in small rivulets

near some bigger flood.

Several times, water carried me away.

Then I was a cedar twig, a fishscale.

And what does the oyster think

On this forest road?

He thinks of his earlier life,

Of meeting her again."

Here's a little Chinese poem I'll give you. Two friends were living alone, about 60. And one would write a poem, Wang Wei, and his friend would answer it. (SINGING) Tong, tong.

Four lines, four lines. Here's one of them.

Wang Wei says, "In the old days, a serious man was not an 'important person.'

He thought making decisions was too complicated for him.

He took whatever small job came along.

Essentially, he did nothing, like these walnut trees."

So his friend's got to answer that. His friend says, "I soon found doing nothing was a great joy to me.

Look, you see, here I am, keeping my ancient promise.

Let's spend today just strolling around these walnut trees.

And the two of us will nourish the ecstasy's Chuang Tzu loved." He mentions an old Chinese meditator. Hmm.

All right. I'm going to read you a couple other little poems of mine, "After Long Busyness." I edit the magazine. I had to support my family. Besides, I'm a schnook and I read everything that comes in the mail.

I sit at my desk. And many times, I don't get out for a walk for a couple of weeks. And here's a poem I wrote when I hadn't been away from my desk for two weeks.

"After Long Busyness"

"I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk.

Moon gone, plowing underfoot, not a trace of light.

Suppose a horse were galloping towards me in this open field?

Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted."

AUDIENCE: What about all of the letters?

ROBERT BLY: I beg your pardon?

AUDIENCE: You have a little poem about all those letters--

ROBERT BLY: Unanswered letters?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I think.

ROBERT BLY: The wind--

"The sun comes in through shutters.

Baskets of unanswered letters lie on chairs.

Some foolish man must live here."

[LAUGHTER]

I'll read a little poem about going in and seeing my daughter asleep in a room at night.

"Tonight the first fall rain washes away my anger and my mustaches."

I don't know. I sent that poem to Louis Simpson and he said, listen, Robert, that first line does not make any sense at all. You don't have any mustaches. I said, well, don't object on that grounds or we'll all be lost.

"Tonight the first fall rain washes away my anger and my mustaches.

I have decided to blame no one for my life.

The water falls like a great privacy.

All the letters fly off the desk.

And the desk itself flies off into the sky.

And only one thing is left,

An intelligence slowly learning to talk of its own suffering.

The night muttering is a gift in the roof of the mouth.

It is a child's face in a dark room,

A blessing, a triumph, a car racing through the rain."

Would you like to hear a poem I wrote for my little boy Noah? He wanted to come up today but-- and Tomasito, Tom's boy, said he wanted to see Noah. So we'll have to do that. But he's about five now.

I went out in California. I went for a walk with him in the little mountains, a little mountain behind our house. And this is a description of going for a walk with my children in California.

"Climbing up Mount Vision with my Little Boy"

"We started up. All the way, he held my hand. Sometimes he falls back to bend over a banana slug. Then he realizes how lonely the slug is and comes running back. He never complained, and we went straight up.

What joy I feel in being with him, how much I love to feel his small leafy hand curl around my finger. He holds on somehow, and we're flying through a cloud. On top, we hunker down beneath some bushes to get out of the wind while the girls go off to play.

And he tells me the story of the little boy who wouldn't cut off his hair and give it to a witch. And so she changed him into a hollow log. And the boy and girl came along and stepped on the log, And the log said, ow. And they stepped on it again, And the log said, ow. And they stepped on it again, And the log said, ow.

Then they looked inside and saw a boy's jacket sticking out. A little boy was in there. 'I can't come out. I've been changed to a hollow log.' He said, 'That's the end.'

[LAUGHTER]

Then I remembered a bit more. The boy and the girl went to a wise man-- He corrected me, 'Wise woman, Daddy--' [CHUCKLES] and said--

[LAUGHTER]

--and said, 'How can we get him changed back again into little boy?' She said, "Here's a pearl. If a crow asked you for it, give it to him.' So they went along.

And the crow came and said, 'Can I have the buttons on your shirt?' And boy said yes, and the crow took them all off. Then he saw the pearl on the shirt pocket, 'Can I have that, too?' 'Yes.' Then the crow said, 'Now we'll go to the witch's house.'

So the Crow started to drop moss down the chimney. And the chimney got full. And the witch started to cough. And he dropped in some more moss. And she had to open the door and run out doors.

And then the crow took an oyster, a big one from the Johnson Oyster Company, and he flew high into the air. And he dropped it right on the witch's head. And that was the end of her. And then the little boy was changed back again into a little boy.

The land on top is bare, sweeping, forbidding-- so unlike a little boy's mind. I asked him what he liked best about the whole walk. He said, 'It was Bethany,' an 8-year-old friend of Mary's, 'going pee-pee in her pants while hiding.'"

[LAUGHTER]

That's exactly what he said.

[APPLAUSE]

I'll read you a couple more of these poems. And we'll end with this, this Jumping Out of Bed things. Here's "Another Doing Nothing Poem." In other words, doing nothing, as the Orientals say, is when you go to a shack or somewhere and you decide to do nothing that day. You're not going to think about your laundry, your parents' birthdays, anything.

You're not going to study. You're going to sit there and be a human being. It's very hard. But they say it's a spiritual discipline. And of course, then, the first thing you notice after two to three hours, you're just totally mucked up. Your head is all full. Everything is running through your head, and it's a big mess.

Then if you stay alone for three to four hours, you'll notice it begin to pass out of your head. And then strange thing, emotions begin to come up in you-- love for people you had almost forgotten. You understand me? Mm-hmm.

Strange experience, I'll never forget the first time I felt that because I had loved human beings and stuff. But then I went up to Northern Minnesota after I'd gone out of college. And I stayed along Lake Superior for maybe a month by myself.

And after about three weeks, I suddenly had a feeling I loved humanity. How insane. I never had that feeling once in my whole life. And I understand what the writers meant when they talked about it. I never felt it when I was with people. Well, "Another Doing Nothing Poem."

"There's a bird that flies through the water.

It's like a whale 10 miles high.

Before it went into the ocean,

It was just a bit of dust from under my bed."

It doesn't make any sense, does it? Hmm.

"A Doing Nothing Poem"

"After walking about all afternoon barefoot,

I have grown long and transparent,

Like the sea slug

Who has lived alone doing nothing

For 18,000 years."

Understand that poem? I'm just a student. I can do nothing for about two days. And then of course, I get hung up again. But a sea slug hasn't done anything for 13,000 years. Think of that when you want a hero to imitate.

[LAUGHTER]

All right. I'll read you a couple of private-- I go up to my shack and I sit there. And here's six little winter privacy poems. There are six poems of two and three lines long.

"About four, a few flakes.

I empty the teapot out in the snow,

Feeling shoots of joy in the new cold.

By nightfall, wind,

The curtains on the south sway softly.

My shack is two rooms. I use one.

The lamplight falls on my chair and table,

And I fly into one of my own poems.

I can't tell you where,

As if I appeared where I am now,

In a wet field, snow falling.

More of the fathers are dying each day.

It's time for the sons.

Bits of darkness are gathering around the sons.

The darkness appears as flakes of light."

Here's a sitting poem, meditation poem.

"There is a solitude like black mud.

Sitting in this darkness singing,

I can't tell if this joy

Is from the body, or the soul, or a third place."

It took me a number of weeks before I got the last line because I kept saying, "I don't know if this joy is on the body or the soul." Then it occurred to me there must be another alternative.

[LAUGHTER]

So I gave up St. Paul at that moment.

[LAUGHTER]

"I can't tell if this joy

Is on the body, or the soul, or a third place."

And here is a poem by listening to Bach, the greatest musician we've ever had, the one who's feeling-- feelings is so incredibly powerful, whose mind is there all the time. Wow, unbelievable. He could raise the dead again and again.

"Listening to Bach"

"There is someone inside this music,

Who is not well described by the names

Of Jesus or Jehovah or the Lord of Hosts."

I'm not saying I know who that divine being is that's in Bach's poetry. But I know it isn't Jehovah, and it isn't Jesus, and it isn't the Lord of Hosts.

"There is someone inside this music,

Not well described by the names

Of Jesus or Jehovah or the Lord of Hosts."

And the last poem is,

"When I woke, new snow had fallen.

I am alone, yet someone else is with me,

Drinking coffee, looking out at the snow."

I said I was going to read a couple of Indian poems, and I will now. And we'll stop. This is an Indian poet of the 16th, 15th century, Kabir. They were translated-- written in Hindi, translated to Bengali. Rabindranath Tagore translated them into Indian English about 1900. And I've just translated them from Indian English into American. So it's a long route.

"I don't know what sort of God we've been talking about.

The caller calls in a loud voice to the Holy One at dusk.

Why? I don't get it.

Surely the Holy One is not deaf.

He hears the delicate anklets that ring on the feet of an insect as it walks.

Go over and over your beads,

Paint weird designs in your forehead,

Wear your hair matted, long, and ostentatious.

But when inside you, there's a loaded gun.

How can you have God?"

16th century.

"Oh, friend, I love you.

Think this over carefully."

That's beautiful. I have to just say one little detail, that everyone in the last 10 years, because we're more aware of feeling and because your generation is closer to feeling than your parents' generation was, therefore so many kids sign their letters "love."

I get them all the time. Some grandkids write to me, Hi, Bob, signs it, "love." I never heard of this guy. I don't know who he is. But anyway, it's sweet. But they did that at Kabir's time, too.

And Kabir says, "Oh, friend, I love you.

Think this over carefully.

If you are in love,

Then why are you asleep?

If you have found him,

Give yourself to him.

Take him.

Why do you lose track of him again and again?

If you are about to fall into heavy sleep anyway,

Why waste time smoothing the bed and arranging the pillows?

Kabir will tell you the truth.

This is what love is like.

Suppose you had to cut your head off and give it to someone else,

What difference would that make?"

I'll read a couple more. Hmm. Here's a lovely one.

"Student, do the simple purification.

You know that the seed is inside the horse chestnut tree.

And inside that seed, there is a horse chestnut tree and the branches and the shade.

So inside the human body, there's a seed. And inside that seed, there's a human body again.

Fire, air, earth, water, and space,

If you don't want the secret one, you can't have these either.

Thinkers, listen. Tell me what do you know of that is not inside the soul?

Take a pitcher full of water, and set it down on the water.

Now you have water inside and water outside.

We mustn't give it a name,

Lest silly people start talking again about the body and the soul.

If you want the truth, I'll tell you the truth.

Listen to the secret sound, the real sound which is inside you

The one no one talks of speaks the secret name to himself

And he's the one who made it all." Mm. Hmm.

"Inside this clay jug, there are canyons and pine mountains.

Kadir always talks about inside. The whole American life as you know is involved in projecting things out. He puts everything,

"Inside this clay jug,

there are canyons and

pine mountains

and the maker of canyons

and pine mountains.

All seven oceans are inside,

and hundreds of millions of stars.

The acid that tests gold is there.

And the one who judges jewels.

And the music

from the strings that no one touches

and the source of all water.

if you want the truth, I'll tell you the truth.

Friend,. Listen the God whom I love is inside."

Let me do one more little poem. It's very beautiful.

In order for a man to have any spiritual life, as I I've said many times, it's necessary for his feeling to wake up, for the feminine part of him to wake up. And if it does wake up, you'll know when it happened.

For a woman, her masculine part is to wake up. And when that wakes up, she knows it's happening. Men in the United States don't want the masculine part of a woman to wake up. They want her to be totally feminine. And then they'll agree to be totally masculine.

There's going to be a man in the house, going to be him. But what that does is to kill the spiritual life absolutely for both of them. There's no possibility. When people are really awake, then the masculine part of the woman grows also. And the feminine part of the man comes up.

Young saying, we're not talking about homosexuality or anything of that sort. I'm talking about the soul, the feminine soul growing and he is being able to feel more. And then in the house, there are four people not two. Follow that?

So therefore, what is the reason it's so complicated with human relationships is that we think that a man and a woman are together, that they're like this. But that isn't the case. They're like this. Here's the male soul of the man and the female soul. And here's the female soul of the man and the male soul of the woman.

And they can relate this way or this way is the way they usually relate. Notice these two are just loose? And they can relate this way. Occasionally, they will relate this way. But when all four are related, that is what is referred to in the couple terms as a marriage.

Machado has that poem that says, "Suddenly, the two of us--" no. "The two of us, with our instincts, suddenly were four." And it is true. Sometimes if you're making love, you can suddenly feel four people in the room. And of course, the point of America in which we hate the feminine and hate feeling is that the men never had a chance to develop their feminine souls at all.

And the women don't encourage it either after they are about 40 years old and they've accepted the crushing by the male. My wife was telling me last night there's a study club in Madison. And it used to be a few years ago that the women would make up the of study club themselves. But they don't do that now.

After about four or five years ago, the women started doing it themselves. They get an outsider to come in same. With the Kiwanis. The Kiwanis gets an outsider to come in and talk to them. And they have one book this year for the whole study club for the whole year, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

[CHATTERING]

The women spend that whole year reading this one book. In the meantime, all the other meetings the minister's wife shows slides, you know, of Norway?

[LAUGHTER]

Now, that's a perfect example of women refusing to develop any of their masculine soul, refusing to think it's getting worse. It's getting worse with the women, just as it's getting worse with the men. And I was shocked. And I thought of this. What would I think if I were married to one of those women?

And that was my only view of women, was one of these who read Jonathan Livingston Seagull all year.

[LAUGHTER]

And then when you ask her, what do you think of it? She says, I-- I don't know. A lot of funny things happen. What do you think of Agnew? I don't know. [MUMBLES] I guess it's-- everybody's got that.

They don't get that way naturally women are more full of life in college than the men are. They get that way because they've been living with this dope for 20 years. And how does he get that way? Because he's living with her. Anyway, you understand what we were going on and on about the same thing.

And sometimes in college, you will find a great teacher. One of the reasons you're in college is a hope that you will find a teacher and a man like Lawrence or someone who will awaken for the women, the male soul, and for the men, the female soul. If you don't find it in college, the chances are you'll never find it at all.

But here's the last poem I'm going to read.

"Knowing nothing shuts the iron gates.

The new love opens them.

And the sound of the gates opening waits the beautiful woman asleep. Kabir says, 'Fantastic.' Don't let a chance like this go by."

That's a man writing at Te Ching. Dante has the same image. He has a sign that describing a woman asleep in the back of his head. And when Beatrice came, that woman woke up. And he was writing to her. That's why he didn't care if he actually saw Beatrice or not.

Does that make any sense to you?

"Knowing nothing shuts the iron gates.

The new love opens them.

The sound of the gates opening

Wakes the beautiful woman asleep.

Kabir says, fantastic.

Don't let a chance like this go by."

To return again to what we were saying, almost the ministers we know have let that chance go by. You can tell it by the dumb way they stand in the pulpit with their hands duh because that spontaneity in the man has to come from the feminine soul. It can't come from any other place.