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THOMAS MCGRATH: Mark went to the trouble of working up several groups of poems on different subjects. And we thought we would read some poems on those subjects. And then if I can find some of my own, I will read some on those subjects. Meantime, if there's anybody who has notions for particular things, you might ask, if you'd like.

If we have poems of the nature that you ask for, we'd be happy to read them. It really would be nice if that could work out, because then you'd have, some of you at least, have the kind of poems that you want. Can you hear, by the way, back there? Yeah. So since you worked these out, you had better start. Tell me the name of the first group.

MARK VINZ: Oh, OK.

THOMAS MCGRATH: And then I can start searching.

MARK VINZ: OK. I want to start, I want to put in a plug for the magazine. Tom and I are both involved with a poetry magazine which draws heavily on the writers of this place. We'll have a new issue out I hope Sunday, which is probably about 2/3 young writers from Minnesota and the Dakotas, which we think is especially important, because there are a number of fine people writing here. And that's one thing I think that's amazed both of us is the tremendous amount of talent, especially among young people, right here in the Fargo-Moorhead area.

So the magazine's called Dakota Territory. I guess it's on sale outside. And just today hot off the press, in fact, we only had a few copies done because the ink is still wet, is a book called Great Grandpa Nettestad is Blind. It's done by a young poet from Moorhead State named Jim Fawbush. And it's a book that we're all very pleased with. We're going to start doing a series of these little books called chapbooks. And chapbook is simply a small collection by an individual poet. And I think I'd like to read a poem out of here to begin things. This is also on sale outside.

One of the things both Tom and I are involved with teaching creative writing at Moorhead State. And one of the things I think we always have to work with young writers is to get them to experience the particular, to experience the concrete. And certainly one of the easiest ways to do that, although one of the most difficult too, is to begin to feel the impact of a particular place on one's work as a writer.

And I think that of all the young writers I've come in contact with since I've been here, which is roughly five years, Jim Fawbush is the one with the most talent and with that tremendous sensitivity towards place. It's not regionalism. I think that's a term that's greatly maligned. To most people, regionalism means narrow minded and provincial. For Jim's poems, they're grounded very much in the regional, in a sense of place, in a sense of his own background and his own heritage. And yet they're poems as good as you'll find anywhere in the country.

So I'd like to read one poem from this collection to begin things. And maybe we can read some more poems on themes that have to do with this particular place as one kind of poem that Tom and I are both involved with as writers, as editors, as teachers. This is called-- let's see if I can find it. "Driving Home From Park River North Dakota in August." Excuse me. This is the first time I've read this out loud.

A winter of hot dust

Today at work

Sand in the eyes,

The teeth, the boots.

I feel like something almost dead.

I'm one of the five men moving like soiled fingers

Over the gray lace of Dakota roads.

The woman and child are at home,

Like two more blossoms on a vine

That sinks its roots into the moon.

A 12 pack bolted down and shot

One by one out the window into the ditch.

A hawk chased off or followed by a sparrow.

40 acres of sunflowers with their heads down.

That's by Jim Fawbush and it's a collection we're very proud of and you should have a look at.

THOMAS MCGRATH: No, go ahead.

MARK VINZ: Read a poem.

THOMAS MCGRATH: First of all, tell me what section you're in, and then I'll try to find one.

MARK VINZ: Let's read poems of place to start with.

THOMAS MCGRATH: All right, place, go ahead.

MARK VINZ: All right. I'll read one and then you read one. This is a poem that I think many of us living here are always trying to write poems about this place and probably they're love hate poems. There's a great deal of love here in the sense of being on the frontier or close to it, both in time and space. And there's probably a great deal to dislike about being here. And there are a number of very fine poets in this area. Dick Lyons, Mary Pryor, for instance.

And this is a poem that I wrote that is one of many that I try to write involving the Dakotas and Minnesota, the Red River Valley. And it makes allusions to poems written by a number of other people. It's called "Living On The Edge Of Dakota." And it begins with a very old joke about where we are, i.e. the end of the world, the end of the Earth.

Some still maintain the end of the Earth is really out there.

Not far, just bypassed by the interstate.

You're halfway to Montana before you understand,

But here on this bare edge,

Where stubborn rivers wander northward,

Through the tight lipped towns,

We dream of ABMs and Indian bones,

A cold Madonna rising from a flat potato field,

And poems like Prairie Winds

That drive us endlessly towards thoughts of snow.

A stopping place,

A far country,

An ancient lake bed,

Where the grandfathers are never still.

A land that travels with us through the dark.

THOMAS MCGRATH: Well, here's the poem that has something to do also with place I guess. It's called "The Buffalo Coat." And what set it off was the fact that my grandfather had a buffalo coat. And anyway, after a while, after about 50 years, the poem came as a result of it. "The Buffalo Coat."

I see him moving in his legendary fleece

Between the super highway

And an Algonquin stone ax,

Between the wild tribes in their lost heat

And the dark blizzard of my grandfather's coat,

Cold with the outdoor cold caught in the curls,

Smelling of the world before the poll tax.

In between the new McAdam and the Scalp Act,

They got him by the short hair,

Had him clipped who once was wild

And all five senses wild,

Printing the wild with his hoofs inflated script

Before the times was money in the bank,

Before it was a crime to be so mild.

But history is a fact,

And moves on feet sharper than his,

Toward wallows deeper than.

And the myth that covered all his moving parts,

Grandfather's time had turned into a coat.

And what kept warm then in the true world's cold

Is old and cold in the world his death began.

More places?

MARK VINZ: OK. This is a poem about a place. I was born in North Dakota out in the middle, north near the Canadian border, a place called Rugby. It's a place that I always was sent to on summers, but I never spent much time in. And I wrote this poem about it. It's called "First Summer, A Reckoning."

They told me it was my hometown,

But I'd never lived there.

My eyes were for cities,

Conspirators from a land of great brown buildings,

Not this place with its one post office,

One hospital, garage, greenhouse, theater.

I had seen them all before,

Seen them in quadruplets

no one here could even dare to conjure,

But had never seen a meadowlark or weeping birch,

Had never tasted the infinite cold water from a neighbor's well,

Nor heard the crickets underneath that immense darkness

Devouring the car sounds and the street sounds

Until there was nothing at all.

Peonies and raspberries gossiping beneath the windows,

Acres of gardens straight and proud

And never again the Oriental Limited,

Galloping those far Dakota fields,

That thin green streak of windows

Deep within the most secret midnight,

Forever growing fainter in my ears.

The Oriental Limited was a train that came through those parts. Go. Another one.

THOMAS MCGRATH: Well, there's a different view of place. This is a notion about coming back. I was thinking about possibly coming back out here at the time I was in Los Angeles and thinking about it with mixed feelings, as you'll see. The poem is called "Ah, To The Villages."

Leaving the splendid plaza and the esplanade,

The majestic facades of metropolitan unease

Led us to the vast savannas of despair, repair,

And let us seek the panoramas of malaise,

The continental anguish,

The hysteria and the nausea of the villages.

Somewhere perhaps where Omaha like a disease

And the magnificent brumal names of Fargo, of Kalamazoo,

Infect the spirit with magnificent ennui.

A Baroque splendor attends our small distress.

We dress in the grand extravaganza of [INAUDIBLE]

Still, there will come evenings without true discontent,

The sparrows loud in the dust

And the crows gone cawing home to the little wood,

The lights ending at the prairie,

And as the divine and healing night comes down,

The town reeling on reasonably content.

In the one horse town, they have eaten the horse alone

But soft, here are not only the megrims of small farms

And the subliminal melancholy of the central square.

Take care, for here you find

An intermontane anguish in the wind that sings you home.

Here is a false front distinguished as your own.

And contentment is momentary in the villages.

MARK VINZ: I think we're going to go on with this alternating sort of order. This is a poem I wrote about one man whom I respected very much. It's a poem I like to read. It's about my grandfather, who was an old fashioned country doctor, horse and buggy doctor, for many years in North Dakota.

A man whom I admired very much, but who died when I was only about 13, so I never was able to get to know. It's cast in the form of a dream, which I actually had. And it involves a number of the place names and things that we were involved with. It's called "Dream Song." Alfred Marcus [? Call, ?] 1876-1955.

Grandfather, I dream of you in the long Dakota night,

In the shadow of sunflowers,

In the cold knife blade of lunar light.

I dream of you horse, buggy, and Oldsmobile,

Physician who could not heal himself.

This room was filled with the smoke of prairie fires,

The litanies of 100 killing snows.

Why is it you are here again tonight?

Has no one told you the game is over?

The last rummy deck stashed away forever,

Main Street locked up tight

In the freezing stare of the Northern Cross.

Yet here we are,

Holed up in an old Great Northern boxcar heading West,

Rugby, Minot, Manitou.

Again, an old man whispering the names,

A ghost map of amulets

In a season of difficult births.

Williston, Cutbank, Coeur d'Alene.

Again, the last long journey,

Forever conjuring our way toward that unfamiliar sea.

THOMAS MCGRATH: Well, this is a poem also in praise of a dead man. It's called "Blues for Cisco Houston," who was a folk singer that some of you must know, and an old friend of mine. And it's a lament for him.

More than 900 miles from home now, Cisco.

Poor boy gone underground to the final proletariat,

Old blue following possum in the new ground corn

In the blaze of your death

By the light of your incendiary guitar.

Vessel of light that black gut box you carried,

Transport of insurrectionary calendars

Between Spain and Cuba,

Bringing to rebels the hot word,

The machine guns of flowers and hummingbirds,

Through the money talking loaves and fishes

Of the God blessed corporate sea.

In season, the moth wing frosts the lamp with incandescent mortality.

And beyond the frets and freights,

Half steps, stops, changes of time, and times,

This train don't carry no rustlers, horse nor tinhorn hustlers.

Gone, glory train, blazing guitar.

But here was a man come with a miracle in his bindle.

Winter multitudes warmed at the electric bread of your song.

The butterfly slept secure at the center of the bomb

And the revolution caught fire whenever you came to town.

MARK VINZ: This is a poem about an old lady who used to live across the Hall from us when we first lived in Moorhead. And she thought of nothing but the old days in the farm. She could never quite distinguish between living in town and an apartment in the old days on the farm. So this poem is for her. It's called "Harvest Widow."

At first light, she creeps to her balcony.

She hears them again,

The heavy dance of steam threshers two stories down.

And now there is so little time

To roll the lefse, bake sweet smelling bread,

A feast for working men,

Sons, brothers, and a husband ripe with prairie dreams.

These were her father's fields.

Below the sun at nooning,

Cars lull in a dusty parking lot.

Her men are sleeping now,

Lost in the shade beyond all balconies.

Deep within an orchard of silent doors,

Her rocking chair creaks against another afternoon.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARK VINZ: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

THOMAS MCGRATH: Yes. Can you tell me what page it's on?

[LAUGHTER]

It's times like this that you'd think it would be nice to have a-- I'm trying to remember where the hell. You read something and I'll find it. You just read till I find it.

MARK VINZ: All right. I'll read one more poem, which is tied into place. And maybe we can change our theme. This is a poem which, again, I like to read. I've read it many times. It has to do with an experience I had as a child at the Custer Monument in South Dakota. No, excuse me, in Montana, at the Little Bighorn. It's called "At The Battle Monument."

There are few signs of the enemy now.

No one thought to mark his passing on that day.

Tourists wander by the chain link fences,

Dreaming out their own imperfect histories alone.

All the lost children beneath this futile monument

Locked forever in each other's arms.

But when their morning struck their eyelids for that last long time,

How they must have wondered

Their God, their battle song,

The precious country they wore on their backs like a robe of light.

In the distance, they marked the soldiers where they fell,

An army of white stones camped on the hillsides

Where there soon will be darkness

Invading the sacred houses of the prairie grass

Where a man may still drown in his own sweet blood.

THOMAS MCGRATH: This is the poem "A Warrant for Pablo Neruda." And it's really appropriate to read it today, because the poem I wrote long ago at a time when Neruda was on the run from the Chilean police. He was a Communist Senator. The Communist Party had been outlawed. And they wanted to clap him in jail, so he went underground. And as I say, on the run.

He wrote a marvelous poem, one poem anyway, during that time about his socks, about a pair of socks that somebody gave to him. And now with the overthrow of the government in Chile by the military and perhaps the CIA, Neruda will no doubt is-- will have a price on his head, no doubt, if he were to try to return to Chile. So this is the poem.

With the fury of cinders,

With the despair of dusty, great, meat eating birds stuffed under glass

With the public stealth of rust on wedding rings,

The shriveled bureaucrats with flag false eyes,

Smug as one legged guides to the blind

Or politicians impersonating men

Water their withered Bible,

Loosen the nights black knife,

And now on the polo fields of the rich

Exercise the clanking hounds of illusion

And oil up a warrant for the 20th century.

They are hunting for you, Neruda.

And who now will stop them from stuffing

The wild birds of the forest

With the blue fission of national neurosis?

Who will found the myth of copper?

Who at Magellan's delta remember the ritual of forgiveness?

No one but you.

No one but you.

It is just.

They must hunt you because of what they have forgotten.

The name of the buried miner,

The bronze face of wheat,

The river of indulgence that flowed from O'Higgins' side

Dries in their heads like moss in a filing cabinet.

And what of Bolivar's tears curling like purple chips

From the lathes of usury?

They go with you to the high Andes

Where police cannot marshal a true man to hunt you

No, though the Supreme Court,

Unhappily sane and naked run through the downtown streets

Shouting that laws have become just,

Black, white, odd, even.

No, the conspiracy of October lilacs is against them.

The frond of innocence cocks the summer rifle.

The union of barley is on strike

And every place an alchemy of resistance

Transmutes your flowering name.

MARK VINZ: To introduce a new theme.

THOMAS MCGRATH: Good idea.

[LAUGHS]

MARK VINZ: Tom is one of the only and real political poets in this country at the present time. There's a great deal of difference between political poets and political poems. And I'm afraid that because of recent happenings like Vietnam, there have been a number of political poems, but there are really very few political poets. And I think I'd like to ask Tom to read a political--

THOMAS MCGRATH: A political poem?

MARK VINZ: Per se.

THOMAS MCGRATH: Well, put that way, I don't know where to start. Because it seems to me that all these poems are political one way or another. Well, it is kind of hard when you say that. I'll read you this one. I've read it so often that I'm tired of it, I guess, though I think it's a good poem. It's called "Ode for the American Dead in Asia."

It's not a new poem. It's not the product of opposition to the Vietnamese war. It's a product of opposition to the Korean War. And it was originally called "Ode for the American Dead in Korea." I changed it to Asia because the war continued and continued. I decided that there wasn't-- I probably could never get around to writing about all of the dead in the various places in Asia. So it became Asia rather than one country. Anyway, this is the poem.

God love you now if no one else will ever,

Corpse in the paddy or dead on a high hill

In the fine and ruinous summer of a war you never wanted.

All your false flags were of bravery and ignorance,

Like grade school maps.

Colors of countries you would never see

Until that weekend in eternity

When laughing, well armed,

Perfectly ready to kill the world and your brother,

The safe commander sent you into your future.

Oh, dead on a hill,

Dead in a paddy,

Leached and tumbled to a tomb of footnotes.

We mourn a changeling.

You [INAUDIBLE] to poverty and drummed to war

By distinguished masters whom you never knew.

The bee that spins his metal from the sun,

The shy mole drifting like a minor ghost through midnight Earth,

All happy creatures run

As strict as trains on rails,

The circuits of blind instinct,

Happy in your summer follies.

You mined a culture that was mined for war.

The state to mold you,

Church to bless,

And always the elders to confirm you in your ignorance.

No scholar put your thinking cap on

Nor warned that in dead seas,

Fishes died in schools

Before inventing legs to walk the land.

The rulers stuck a tennis racket in your hand,

An ark against the flood.

In time of change,

Courage is not enough.

The blind mole dies

And you on your hill who did not know the rules.

Wet in the windy counties of the dawn,

The lone crow skirls his draggled passage home

And God whose sparrows fall aslant his gaze like grace or confetti

Blinks and he is gone and you are gone.

Your scarecrow valor grows and rusts like early lilac

While the rose blooms in Dakota and the Stock Exchange flowers.

Roses, rents, all things conspire

To crown your death with wreaths of living fire

And the public mourners come.

The politic tear is cast in the forum.

But in another year, we will mourn you,

Whose fossil courage fills the limestone histories,

Brave, ignorant, amazed,

Dead in the rice paddies,

Dead on the nameless hills.

MARK VINZ: I've written very few political poems, per se, although I suppose it might be said that a sense of politics is behind the work of many American writers. I'll read you one. This is a long poem. Well, not very long, really. It's based on an epigraph by Tom, a statement by Tom McGrath, called Dakota is everywhere from his long poem, which I really believe.

Dakota is everywhere in the sense of human beings. And it's called "Primer Lesson" and it's a kind of Dick and Jane poem, like a primer is a sort of Dick and Jane experience. And it was really one of the first political poems I ever wrote. "Primer Lesson."

We are driving through South Dakota,

Looking for buffalo, looking for wildflowers and monuments.

On the car radio, the president announces that the war is over.

It is really over this time,

A peace with honor this time.

Everything in South Dakota is moving.

Station wagon loads of tourists in search of stone faces,

Pickups, semis, tandems,

Old men in tennis shoes on motorcycles,

A bicycle troop of Girl Scouts.

Even the dust clouds have wheels.

On the car radio, the president announces that poverty has been devalued,

That the military budget has been cut back to $150 billion.

We are driving through a small town in South Dakota,

The 30th small town we have driven through today.

All the small towns in South Dakota look alike.

All the roads in South Dakota look alike.

This is the same small town we've been driving through all day.

It has 62 gas stations, 13 McDonald's stands, two liquor stores.

We have stopped at all 77 locations at once.

The name of this small town is Custer.

Every small town in South Dakota is called Custer or Luther.

Some are called Wounded Knee.

On the car radio, the president announces

That the economic crisis has been a complete success.

We cannot stop driving through South Dakota.

We cannot turn off the car radio,

Bristling with salvation music and the presidential sacrament.

We cannot find the buffalo or the wildflowers,

Only the Gateway to the West drive in theater,

Filled with conestogas and hostiles,

Dropping eternally from their ponies like cardboard ducks,

And John Wayne, 30 feet tall, who signs the treaty,

Speaking in impossible sign language above the car radio.

He waves to us as we drive past

Into the roads that unroll suddenly before us

Into the long Dakota night.

THOMAS MCGRATH: Read another, Mark. I haven't got anything to read.

MARK VINZ: One more. This is one I haven't ever read before. It's a recent poem. It's called "Reconnaissance."

The jet fighter screeches low,

Cracking the windows like marzipan.

Unabashed, the streetlights doze in long shadows.

The elms bend only to the wind.

No moving targets.

Ground 0 is a red bicycle,

Abandoned to a field of sun.

Back and forth, the great flat dish that holds us,

The engines hoot and roar,

And drop at last beyond the farthest edge.

In silence, the natives resume their business,

Speaking in strange tongues.

Teflon, Teflon, Teflon,

Just pop them into the dishwasher.

Easy, nice, another dry run.

THOMAS MCGRATH: Well, I don't know.

MARK VINZ: Let's change the subject.

THOMAS MCGRATH: All right. Very good. Here's a long change. This is a poem called "An Incident in the Life of a Prophet."

And a voice like a voice in dreams

Cried out in the stone wilderness,

Calling out of the whirlwind,

Sounding its gongs and thunders,

Saying death to the four kings of indifference

To all despoilers of sweat and virtue

And death to the defamers of the sacrament of wheat,

Destroy the temples of these pious sinners.

And the liberals said, hush mate,

We know it is hard,

And naturally we will help you,

But you must be conscious of the danger

Of letting the people know they've been had.

For Christ's sake, don't wake up that sleeping monster.

And the voice as a burning dove

Flew out of a blue Monday

With an iron curse in its throat

Like the spike of the morning whistle,

Saying death to the three horrors of history,

Church, state, and property,

And those privileged coiners of the counterfeit currency of life,

Level the stations of compulsion times stony circuits.

And the hireling said,

Now shut your trap, Jack,

You're beginning to sound like a man with his head underwater.

Lie back and relax and everything will be Jake

Or there'll be hell before breakfast and no snow all winter.

And the voice cried down like a bell from the ruined towers of conscience,

Shaking the chromium flowers in the garden of moral decrees,

Saying death to the two nuns of coercion

Who steal the candy of childhood

Woe to that subtle thief of youth,

The nine armed God of usury,

Whose hands are in everyone's pocket.

And the doctor said with a slick shine in his eyes

And a skinful of junk

Lie down and count to 20.

And he turned to the banker and said,

Knife and forceps, please,

And they broke into his body without warrant of entry.

But the voice cried like a trumpet from the nave of the slashed throat.

The heart leaped out of the broken trench of his breast and shouted.

Out of the ports of his eyes flew the hawks of the first four seasons.

Born from his dreaming blood was the red flag of the fifth.

I've never read that one before.

MARK VINZ: Here's one I've never read. There's a very well known poet named James Wright who's published many books and was one of the better known poets in this country who actually spent some time in Fargo-Moorhead a number of years ago teaching summer school at Moorhead State. And Wright was one of the first real poets I discovered. And it took me a long time, I think, to get out of his influence. And I was reading recently a copy of his new book called Two Citizens which somebody had loaned me. And I wrote this poem. It's my open letter to James Wright called "Dear James Wright."

Today I'm reading your newest book,

Open to where a page was folded over.

Hotel Lenox, a beautiful poem

About love and wings and lemon light.

On page 29 just above where it says in red

Property of the Fargo Public Library.

So I, having no institution to claim my love,

Having never even been to the Hotel Lenox,

Needed to write a poem about it all

If only to say

I too love her, this woman you speak of,

And this more dangerous,

You and the Fargo Public Library know now

What's happened to her since last you looked.

You find one?

THOMAS MCGRATH: No, go ahead. Oh yeah, I found one. Well, this is also about somebody. It's not about any honest to God writer, but maybe a kind of an amalgam maybe. It's called "The Defeat of the Novelist."

Waiting for his characters to grow,

He brooded on his first novel for 10 years.

By that time, his hero had grandchildren.

And while the novelist, like , Homer sometimes slept

Had put on 765 and 1/4 pounds.

It was discouraging nevertheless.

The novelist decided he could turn him into a trilogy,

But now and again muttered something in his sleep,

Some 45 grandchildren stoned something.

The second book was easier,

Except for the pigeons.

They were everywhere.

They were good for nothing.

They were furry, white, imaginary pigeons.

He hoped to eat some,

But they never come down off the roof.

His hero had turned to a pigeon fancier.

Eventually it was too much.

The novelist push him off the ledge.

He fell all the way through the 16th chapter,

765 pounds of him.

The novelist give up using pillows.

It was in the third book that the trouble came.

It turned out that our hero caught

On a fourth story clothesline from chapter five

Still lives great bird

It was in the third book.

Our hero was analyzed.

He lost 909 and 1/4 pounds instantly.

No longer a slob but a pure bastard,

He began to put on airs, sick airs.

His dreams gave the novelist nightmares,

Nightmares of a special kind,

Because our hero's analyst and existential Jungian

Was going through a zen phase of the beat variety.

It's all been recorded in Venice.

To make these matters monumentally worse,

His hero, whose name is Larry or Harry,

Decided he is one of Jung's archetypal images,

A centaur, in fact.

He enter himself at Santa Anita,

Which wouldn't have been so bad,

Except he run out of the money.

He do not fail to put all the novelist's money down.

It was the last straw.

It was a bad day for Dostoevsky,

For American letters, for Johnny Longden.

MARK VINZ: This is a poem. Well, editing the magazine, both Tom and I have had a lot of experience with people sending poems from all over the country. But there are certain definable types, and they all feel inclined to enclose letters, most of which are silly, some of which are very tragic. There's a typical letter, for instance, and the postmark is usually a basement in Brooklyn.

And the letter is involved with something like, oh, you're publishing a magazine called Dakota Territory and I've written all these poems about Dakota and I'm sure they're exactly what you have in mind. And they're poems about somebody's idea of North Dakota, which ended in roughly 1875. So I wrote a series of poems called "Letters to the Editor." And they're all based loosely, some of them not so loosely, on letters that I've gotten with poems coming into the magazine. So "Letters to the Editor." Only the first poem has a title. The rest of them simply have salutation. "One, Success Story."

This morning's mail consists of five letters.

The first is from a girl in Steubenville, Ohio.

She tells me she is a poet.

She has taken a creative writing class at junior college,

Published six sonnets in Dry Gulch and elsewhere.

She is convinced her poems are suited to my magazine,

Which she has never read.

She also reads Harper's and Saturday Review,

Has some experience writing novels, stories, one act plays,

As well as book reviews, scenarios, and obituaries of famous authors,

Both living and dead.

This girl from Steubenville has enchanted me

Right down to the unstamped return envelope,

The request for free subscriptions and pertinent advice.

The sonnets, 17 lined and grinning.

I lose the morning dreaming my reply.

Do something useful with these poems.

They are too much for me.

Build a husband out of them.

See a marriage counselor.

Experiment with adultery and divorce.

When I am finished,

I reread the letter,

Discovering on the back side of the page the following information.

Statement of copyright and publication,

Printed photo offset in 11 point Baskerville on Beckett text.

Mine is signed copy number 343 out of a first impression numbering 500.

Price, $0.25.

Two.

Dear sir, I am a confessional poet from Decatur, Illinois.

My mother is a librarian.

My father sells used cars.

My poems, as you will see, are mostly about snakes and sunsets.

After all, how much is there to confess in Decatur, Illinois?

Three.

To whom it may concern,

No one knows how a poet suffers.

These are some of my poems.

They're about suffering.

I have collected nearly 3,000 rejection slips in the last five years.

Please send me one of yours.

[LAUGHTER]

Four.

Ed, parentheses, Brooklyn, June 19.

I am a freelance writer specializing in children's books

And articles on a wide variety of subjects.

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Send me your payment rates

And I will write you a poem.

Five.

Dear shithead, this makes 14 poems you've rejected this spring alone.

The shit you print reflects your taste.

It's editors like yourself who ruin it all

And I just hope you're pleased.

P.S. enclosed, find five new poems.

[LAUGHTER]

THOMAS MCGRATH: Yeah, well.

MARK VINZ: New subject.

THOMAS MCGRATH: New subject. We're getting-- oh yeah, I'd like to.

MARK VINZ: We're going to read some poems--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

THOMAS MCGRATH: I've only got one such poem. You're watching that, huh? This is a poem for Tomasito. Is he sleeping? He's gone. OK, anyway.

MARK VINZ: He deserted.

THOMAS MCGRATH: It's for Tomasito. He was born in New York, and that's maybe important to know here. Not very, but.

My son is a tiny blast furnace

That burns nothing but his mother's milk.

Little fire in the barrio of hunger

In the coldest city in the land.

But he'll keep us warm in Dakota

In the all American winter,

In the blizzards at Wounded Knee,

Even beyond the Missouri.

MARK VINZ: I've got two short poems. One is by Katie, who's my oldest daughter, who's four. And this is a poem she actually wrote. I simply put it down and tightened it up a little bit. It's called "Katie's Poem." And it goes like this. It involves a ritual dance to which I'm not going to do.

Do not step on my shadow.

It is a magic coat that I carry with me.

You will fall into it.

You will fall down 100 stairs,

And a man with desert in his hair

Will come and get you.

You will be sorry,

For he is my grandfather's grandfather.

He will tell you,

This is what happens when you step on my shadow.

THOMAS MCGRATH: That's beautiful.

MARK VINZ: And here's a little poem for both my daughters, Katie and Sarah. It's called simply "Daughters."

Hand in hand, they wander through the yard,

An entire mobile orphanage for lost insects, dandelions, worms, bark.

In the village of pebbles, they alone are rulers,

High up in their swings,

Chanting wind songs to their hair.

THOMAS MCGRATH: More?

MARK VINZ: No, going-- another topic.

THOMAS MCGRATH: Well, here's a few short poems. It's called "Magic Realism."

The 50-year-old wedding suit,

Threadbare fireworks,

Beside which the company gold gift watch expands

These all but impossible hours.

Here's another little one that's called "That's The Way It Goes."

Two numbers met on a narrow trail.

I will go around you, said number two.

I will go through you, said number one.

Here's a little one called "Old Friends."

West wind sleet,

Cold November breath,

The scarecrow in the shivering corn.

Here's another little one. Well, here's a group of little ones.

After moon down,

I hear the hot month corn stretching its joints,

A distant coyote,

This growing peace.

The next one.

The leaves are burnt by the frost.

In still autumn, the cry of--

The leaves are burnt by the frost.

In still autumn, the cry of wild geese freezes the moonlight.

A friend calls, saying I have a new poem.

And then this one.

Forlorn crows in the rotting February snow,

Franz Josef land,

I remember the polar rectitudes.

MARK VINZ: I'll read a few short ones too. This is called "Letter From Moorhead."

It is as possible as this.

Dakota is still here,

Slowly aging just beyond the river

Fenced in by phone lines

And undeviating rows of sugar beets.

I live in a dry lake bed,

Flat and literal,

Still listen to ships passing,

Though there aren't many.

Here's a poem about-- it was inspired originally by my grandmother, who's now dead. It's called "Genesis."

I have watched the old ones

Sitting on park benches,

Hands resting in their laps like pale chrysanthemums,

Beautiful and useless,

And my own hands so tightly coiled,

Unwilling to open even to write this poem.

And here's one called "After The Political Convention." Another short poem that touches on place.

Wheat fields full of clouds,

Abandoned motors, rust,

And two old farmers slumped across a table,

Talking to each other in their sleep.

THOMAS MCGRATH: Did you notice the time?

MARK VINZ: Five minutes.

THOMAS MCGRATH: OK. Here's a poem I guess I wrote last winter, which was a bad time for poets. There are a number of poets, good poets, who died last winter. This is the poem. It's called "The Deaths of the Poets."

They went away in the cold

In the time when the nights are long,

Flying in the nearest direction

To where all months are south,

Leaving behind their scouting reports from our old war,

They parachute forever toward fields as blank and white as a page.

We're closing out now, I suppose.

MARK VINZ: Let me read one, then you read one.

THOMAS MCGRATH: All right, OK.

MARK VINZ: We'll read two more. I want to read one and Tom will read "Gone Away Blues" to close it. This is called, well, it's wish fulfillment, I suppose. It's called "Last Will And Testament." It's in two parts. One.

My loves, if I could leave you one last message,

It would be this.

Beware of men who talk to trees on windy nights,

Who smile too much and speak of lightning,

Never being struck,

Who can sleep only on their right sides,

Who travel lightly, always looking back.

Most of all, beware of men who bear messages.

Two.

The night is dropping to the empty fields,

All these towns, these tiny points of light

Flung across the prairie like dragon's teeth

And the river waiting,

That distant country on the other shore,

Where they cannot read your footsteps.

Good traveling, loves.

There is so little time.

Listen to the moonlight while you can.

THOMAS MCGRATH: This poem is called "Gone Away Blues," and it's a poem for defectors, I guess you could say, from most everything. "Gone Away Blues."

Sirs, when you are in your last extremity,

When your admirals are drowning in the grass green sea,

When your generals are preparing the total catastrophe,

I just want you to know you cannot count on me.

I have ridden to hounds through my ancestral hall,

I have picked the eternal crocus on the ultimate hill.

I have fallen through the window of the highest room,

But don't ask me to help you, because I never will.

Sirs, when you move that map pin,

How many souls must dance?

I don't think all those soldiers have died through happenstance.

The inscrutable look on your scrutable face I can read at a glance,

And I'm cutting out of here at the first chance.

I have been wounded climbing the second stair.

I have crossed the ocean in the hull of a live wire.

I have eaten the asphodel of the dark side of the moon.

But you can call me all day, and I just won't hear.

Oh, patriotic mister with your big ear to the ground,

Sweet old curly scientist wiring the birds for sound,

Oh, lady with a stubborn glass,

Heart and your heels so rich and round.

I'll send you a picture postcard from somewhere I can't be found.

I have discovered the grammar of the public good.

I have invented a language that can be understood.

I have found the map of where the body is hid,

And I won't be caught dead in your neighborhood.

Oh, hygienic inventor of the bomb that's so clean,

Oh, lily white senator from east turnip green,

Oh, celestial mechanic of the money machine,

I'm going someplace where nobody makes your scene.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Adios, au revoir, so long,

Sayonara, dovidenja, ciao,

Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye.

[APPLAUSE]

MARK VINZ: Thank you.