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SPEAKER: It is a particular honor for me to welcome Philip Levine, a poet recognized by his peers as a visionary of our troubled, mysterious times. The poet Rilke, in talking about what makes good poetry, says that before one can write even 10 lines of poetry that are good, one must gather memories a whole life long and then be able to forget these memories when they are many. Then one must have the patience, the great patience to wait until these memories emerge again, for it is not until they have turned to blood within us to glance and gesture, nameless, and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves that authentic poetry can be written.

As will become apparent this evening, for Philip Levine, the memories he has gathered his whole life long have turned to blood and glance and gesture, and have made him this visionary of our troubled and mysterious times. Philip Levine and his identical twin brother were born of Russian Jewish immigrants in Detroit in 1928. His father died when he was five, and his mother opened a gift shop at the front door in a working-class neighborhood in 1936, just as the Great Depression entered the front door of American family life.

At the age of 14, he began what he calls a succession of stupid jobs, which included being baker of wonder breads, plater of plumbing fixtures, assembler of Cadillac transmissions, loader of boxcars, and washer of pop bottles. After all this work, he went on to earn a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa, where he taught engineering, English and Greek, and biblical literature. There, he also studied under John Berryman, whom he calls the most remarkable teacher he has ever known.

Since that time, he has worked as teacher or writer in residence at Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, Vassar, Brown, and the National University of Australia, to name just a few places. Philip Levine's numerous awards include the Lenore Marshall Award for the best book of poetry by an American in 1976 for the collection, The Names of the Lost, two Guggenheim Foundation Awards in poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Ashes and 7 Years from Somewhere. And in 1980, the first American Book Award for his collection, Ashes. His most recent collection, A Walk with Tom Jefferson, received the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award as the best book of poetry published in 1988.

His newest book of poetry titled What Work Is focuses on the theme he will take up with us tonight-- the value and place of work in our lives, how we work, the effect our social surroundings have on the work that we do. As all of you are aware, and sometimes painfully so, the motto of the Benedictine order and Benedictine schools the world over is pray and work, ora et labora. This shorthand rule calls us to place work first, both the sacred work of prayer and worship, which orients us towards God, as well as the crucial worldly work of study, writing, and earning honestly the bread that we eat.

Levine's poetry is bound not only to bolster our cherished notions of what work is but also to conflict with and broaden our scope about what it means to carry on the most human of activities in an often inhuman world. As poetry critic Hayden Carruth puts it, "Levine's poems are about endurance in all its senses, and that is their affirmation." They are about the kind of courage people have when courage fails. In short, they are such poems as possess, beyond their technical strength and emotional urgency, a kind of necessity.

Whatever it is, the truth must exist for all our sakes. Levine is one of the few poets with clarity of mind and strength of heart to make truth exist and certify it relentlessly. Please join me in welcoming Philip Levine.

PHILIP LEVINE: What do you do when you get these eloquent descriptions, and it's just you? I always like to read new poems as well as old poems for a number of reasons-- to hear how they sound, to hear where they fail, to hear where they don't fail. Hopefully, where they don't fail.

But since so much was made of work-- in the room I'm staying, there's a book called Worship and Work. And I looked at it, and, I said, well, it's half me. But as you'll discover, it may be all of me. So let me read the title poem of this collection to come, which is called What Work Is.

"We stand in the rain in a long line, waiting at Ford Highland Park for work. You know what work is. If you're old enough to read this, you know what work is, although you may not do it.

Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe 10 places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and, of course, it's someone else's brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead, a man is waiting who will say, 'No, we're not hiring today,' for any reason he wants.

You love your brother. Now suddenly, you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother who's not beside you or behind or ahead because he's home, trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you're too young or too dumb, not because you're jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no, just because you don't know what work is."

Poetry was actually, in some ways, a gift to me from my mother who loved poetry-- rather awful poetry, to be honest-- and wrote poetry, or so she said. She didn't show it to me, but I bet it was pretty good. She's very spunky and smart. But the stuff she had me reading was hideous.

She loves Sibelius too. Oh, God, those long Sundays with Sibelius that got longer and longer. And my gift to my mother was modern poetry, with which I beat her over the head, saying, Ma, this is really poetry, and the music of Detroit, which was jazz, which my mother took to like a maniac. I mean, she just loved jazz. She didn't know it until I got it on record and brought it home.

And the great jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell, in fact, came to my mother's 80th birthday to play for Mama, as he called her. And this is a poem about my mother and jazz and the music. Jazz was the great gift to me, too, of Detroit. It was enormously significant not more than just as music but as something else.

I had the good fortune to go to high school and college with a number of young people who played jazz music, men and women. Some of them very famous, later to become very famous, like Tommy Flanagan and Kenny Burrell and Pepper Adams. But these were young people who, at 17 and 18 and 19, were living the lives of artists in an America in which I didn't know people lived the lives of artists.

And they became my model. I mean, when I thought I'd become a poet, it didn't seem that outrageous. I mean, these people were musicians, and they were living off it or trying anyway.

This poem is called "Soloing." One reference, the Grapevine. I live in the Great Central Valley of California. And in order to get to Los Angeles, you have to drive over something called the Grapevine. It's the Tehachapi Mountains that separate the Great Central Valley from the Los Angeles Basin. And that highway, which winds its way up, is called the Grapevine.

"Soloing." But my mother is blind, by the way. That explains some references in the poem. "My mother tells me she dreamed of John Coltrane, a young Trane playing his music with such joy and contained energy and rage, she could not hold back her tears. And sitting awake now, her hands crossed in her lap, the tears start in her blind eyes. The TV set behind her is gray, expressionless. It is late, the neighbors quiet, even the city-- Los Angeles-- quiet.

I have driven for hours down 99, over the Grapevine into heaven to be here. I place my left hand on her shoulder, and she smiles. What a world, a mother and son finding solace in California just where we were told it would be, among the palm trees and all-night supermarkets pushing orange back-lighted oranges at 2:00 AM.

'He was alone,' she says, and does not say, just as I am, 'soloing.' What a world. A great man half her age comes to my mother and sleep to give her the gift of song, which, shaking the tears away, she passes on to me, for now, I can hear the music of the world in the silence and that word-- soloing. What a world. When I arrived, the great bowl of mountains was hidden in a cloud of exhaust, the sea spread out like a carpet of oil, the roses I had brought from Fresno browned on the seat beside me, and I could have turned back and lost the music."

I was asked today by a woman about writing poems about teaching. I've been a teacher for much of my adult life, though if you ask my students, they might say it was my pre-adult life. I started teaching when I was about 30, and I've taught on and off ever since.

And I think this woman had searched my books perhaps and found no poems there about teaching or about the classroom. I have written some, but I didn't like them that much and so didn't put them in the books. One writes bad poems so that one might write good poems, but you never know whether it worked. You only know for sure that you wrote bad poems, and then you wait.

But this is a poem about a class. But as I said then, I said, the magic of the classroom was when I was a student, not when I was a teacher. It was an incredible place when I was a student. I think I was a better student than a teacher anyway.

I was a terrific student. I wanted to remain a student forever. I was doing so well in the sixth grade, I thought I'd just do it again and again and again. They moved me up to the seventh with bigger boys.

And this screwy little poem, it's meant to be a screwy little poem. It derives from the fact that nothing seems to be known about the fact that Edgar Degas, the great French painter, for a short period of his life, taught junior high in Detroit. Nothing was said about this at the great retrospection of his work in Paris or when it moved, for example, to New York. Not one mention was made in the catalog, and I was disgusted and offended, having been his student. So I wrote this poem to correct this misinformation. It's called "Monsieur Degas Teaches Art and Science at Durfee Intermediate School, Detroit, 1942."

Teaching, after all, is a kind of work. Your students may not think so, but it is. "He made a line on the blackboard, one bold stroke from right to left diagonally downward, and stood back to ask, looking, as always, at no one in particular, 'What have I done?' From the back of the room, Freddie shouted, 'You've broken a piece of chalk.' Monsieur Degas did not smile. 'What have I done?' he repeated. The most intellectual students looked down to study their desks, except for Gertrude Bimmler, who raised her hand before she spoke, 'Monsieur Degas, you have created the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle.'

[LAUGHTER]

Degas mused. Everyone knew that Gertrude could not be incorrect. 'It is possible,' Louis Warshowsky added precisely, 'that you have begun to represent the roof of a barn.' I remember that it was exactly 20 minutes past 11:00, and I thought at worst, this would go on another 40 minutes.

It was early April. The snow had all but melted on the playgrounds. The elms and maples bordering the cracked walks shivered in the new winds. And I believed that before I knew it, I'd be swaggering to the candy store for a Milky Way. Monsieur Degas pursed his lips, and the room stilled until the long hand of the clock moved to 21, as though in complicity with Gertrude, who added confidently, 'You've begun to separate the dark from the dark.' I looked back for help, but now the trees bucked and quaked, and I knew this could go on forever."

While I am amusing you, which is one of the wonderful things you can do if you're a writer, let me read another screwy poem. It's called "Gin." It's named after the beverage and not the card game. The beverage has meant more to me than the card. I'm not a gambler.

"The first time I drank gin, I thought it must be hair tonic. My brother swiped the bottle from a guy whose father owned a drug store that sold booze in those ancient, honorable days when we acknowledged the stuff was a drug. Three of us passed the bottle around, each tasting with disbelief. People paid for this?

People had to have it the way we had to have the women we never got near. Actually, they were girls. But never mind. The important fact was their impenetrability.

Leo, the third foolish partner, suggested my brother should have swiped Canadian whisky or brandy. But Eddie defended his choice on the grounds of the expressions "gin house" and "gin lane," both of which indicated the preeminence of gin in the world of drinking, a world we were entering without understanding how difficult exit might be. Maybe the bliss that came with drinking came only after a certain period of apprenticeship. Eddie likened it to the holy man's self-flagellation to experience the fullness of faith. He was very well-read for a kid of 14 in the public schools.

So we dug in and passed the bottle around a second time and then a third in silence, each of us expecting some transformation. 'You get used to it,' Leo said. 'You don't like it, but you get used to it.'

I know now that brain cells were dying for no earthly purpose, that three boys were becoming increasingly de-spiritualized even as they took into themselves these spirits. But I thought then I was, at last, sharing the world with the movie stars, that before long, I would be shaving because I needed to, that hair would sprout across the flat prairie of my chest and plunge even to my groin, that first girls and then women would be drawn to my qualities. Amazingly, later, some of this took place.

But first, the bottle had to be emptied. And then the three boys had to empty themselves of all they had so painfully taken in and by means even more painful as they bowed by turns over the eye of the toilet bowl to discharge their shame. Ahead lay cigarettes, the futility of guaranteed programs of exercise, the elaborate lies of conquest no one believed, forms of sexual torture and rejection undreamed of. Ahead lay our 15th birthdays, acne, deodorants, crabs, salves, butch haircuts, draft registration, the military and political victories of Dwight David Eisenhower who brought us Richard Nixon with wife and dog. Any wonder we tried gin?"

This is a serious poem about my discovery of your religion or some portion of it. It was an amazing experience for me. And I try to capture the amazement of a child in a world that he didn't understand, which is what I'm trying to do in my adult poems-- trying to capture the amazement in the face of the world that I still don't understand. It's called "The Seventh Summer."

"'How could I not know God had a son?' the biggest kid asked. I considered. No one told me. Did I ever go to church? Yes, but they spoke a language I didn't actually understand.

The three stared at me. I could have answered that it was possible God did not have a son and that this picture over what was to be my bed was a fake. For one thing, it wasn't a photograph. For another, it looked like an ad from life.

But I was already sorry I'd said, 'Who is he?' referring to the figure displayed behind glass in a plain wooden frame. What I truly wanted to know was why God had let anyone do such a thing to his son-- nail his hands and feet to a huge wooden cross from which he sagged in what appeared to be less discomfort than I would have felt. 'The Jews done it,' the biggest one said, as though reading my mind.

I felt a chill run through me, sure that once more I was going to be blamed for what I had not done or what I'd done but done without meaning to do. But the boys-- the oldest was 16, over twice my age-- left me to myself, for it was early to bed for everyone. I lay a while in the silent dark of the farmhouse, wondering if it could be so, that God had a son he had let die. And if this were so, why no one had told me so that I might understand why life could be so puzzling for all of us.

Days passed before Lars, the 14-year-old, told me that it was OK. This Jesus had died so that all of us could be saved. In the end, things turned out for the best. That was Sunday after the boys had returned from church, to which I did not go, and before we walked into town to swim in the big public place.

I remember best how sweet was the lake water we swam in, how I could even swallow little gulps of it and not feel ill, and how large the bodies around me were, Lars and Sven thrashing after the girls in their dark wool suits, the girls squealing with mock hurt when they would catch them up in their pale arms, for though their faces were deeply brown, their bodies were ghostly. Sven, Lars, and Thomas, three boys as big as men, who let me climb to their secret room beside the hayloft where they smoked and spoke of women, the laughter rushing out of their great throats, the strange words I had never heard before coughed out in sudden spasms, and such hopes uttered as they moved about the room in a half dance, half swordfight, calling out the magic names of the absent girls as they stroked their own bodies at chest and crotch or rolled on the floor in mock death agony. August in Michigan, the world spinning around me, my mother gone in the grief of final loss from which one day she would awaken in daylight, one year before the wars in Ethiopia, Spain, and China could give my growing up its particular name. And yet I sat at their table that night, head bowed in the grace I did not say, thankful for corn, beans, and poisonous pork, and understood it all."

When I say in this poem that this woman is someone out of my childhood, seems like someone out of my childhood, I'm referring to the fact that, as a child, I lived in Detroit, which, at that time, was the third largest Polish city in the world. Warsaw, Chicago, and then Detroit. And many of the people my age that I met spoke English very haltingly and some not at all because they didn't attend school. They worked instead of going to school. It's called "The Simple Truth."

Henri is spelled with an "I" here. It's not to be confused with the Henry that John Berryman uses in The Dream Songs. "The Simple Truth."

"I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes, took them home, boiled them in their jackets, and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. Then I walked through the dried fields on the edge of town. In middle June, the light hung on in the dark furrows at my feet. And in the mountain oaks overhead, the birds were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers squawking back and forth, the finches still darting into the dusty light.

The woman who sold me the potatoes was from Poland. She was someone out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses, praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables at the roadside stand and urging me to taste even the pale, raw, sweet corn trucked all the way, she swore, from New Jersey. 'Eat. Eat,' she said. 'Even if you don't, I'll say you did.'

Some things, you know all your life. They are so simple and true. They must be said without the elegance of rhyme. They must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, the glass of water, the absence of light gathering in the shadows of picture frames. They must be naked and alone. They must stand for themselves.

My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965 before I went away, before he began to kill himself, the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter.

It is obvious. It stays in the back of your throat like a truth you never uttered because the time was always wrong. It stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken, made of that dirt we call Earth, the metal we call salt, in a form we have no words for, and you live on it."

Amazing-- sometimes good things come out even of poetry readings. I know you're counting the minutes till you can go home or wherever it is you're going. But once I gave a poetry reading at Tufts where I used to teach. And I used to give an annual reading there so that my colleagues could see how little I had done to earn my enormous salary. I was only there seven years. The jealousy finally got to be too much for me.

But once after a reading, a wonderful woman and a wonderful poet who worked with me-- her name was-- her name still is Marie Howe, H-O-W-E. Now she's publishing, and you can find her work. She's really a stunning poet and a terrific person.

She said to me about a particular poem which I don't have with me, so I can't read it. But you can perhaps find it somewhere. Only I can't think of the title. But I remember the name of the book it's in-- Paradise Lost, yeah. No, it's in--

[LAUGHTER]

It's in my book, One for the Rose. And in it, there's a woman who's working-- she's working. And at a certain point in the poem, she's disgusted with life and work and everything. And she's got this rag around her head. And she takes it off, and she just says, oh, shit, and stands there frozen.

And the poem is an effort to comfort her. The poem is-- yeah, it's a kind of gesture to go to her and say, I know it's terrible, but take up your life again. You have to. You have no choice.

And it was based on a woman, my own sense of a woman I worked with who once did that and went back to work on her own without my poem and just went back to work. And she was a very striking and beautiful woman in an odd way. In fact, when I first saw her, I didn't know if she were a man or a woman.

She was taller than I and very drawn and muscular. And she worked in a shirt with the sleeves cut off. She had very dark skin and very dark hair, which you could hardly see because of this thing she wore over it. And she worked with enormous intensity. So there was something intense and beautiful about her. It's very striking.

And Marie Howe, listening to that poem, said, you must write about that woman again. But she put it on me like-- she didn't say, it would be nice if-- she said, you must. You must, she said. And I looked at her, and she said, I want that poem. I want that poem, [? like ?] a commandment.

OK, all right. So I went home, and the next day, I wrote it. And I took it to her, and she said, good, it's done. Now you can do whatever the hell you want to do with the rest of your life.

But it was kind of marvelous to be commanded in this way, to have someone else take over the responsibility. You do that-- because that doesn't happen in poetry. You have to think what's going to happen, da-da-da-da, and you ruin it. But to be told, do it, and then to do it-- I don't know if I did it right, but at least I did my best, which is all any of us can do. It's called "Coming Close."

"Take this quiet woman. She has been standing before a polishing wheel for over three hours. And she lacks 20 minutes before she can take a lunch break. Is she a woman?

Consider the arms as they press the long brass tube against the buffer. They are striated along the triceps, the three heads of which clearly show. Consider the fine dusting of dark down above the upper lip and the beads of sweat that run from under the red kerchief across the brow and are wiped away with a blackening wristband in one odd motion a child might make to say, no, no.

You must come closer to find out. You must hang your tie and jacket in one of the lockers in favor of a black smock. You must be prepared to spend shift after shift, hauling off the metal trays of stock, bowing first, knees bent for a purchase, then lifting with a gasp, the first word of tenderness between the two of you.

Then you must bring new trays of dull, unpolished tubes. You must feed her, as they say, in the language of the place. Make no mistake, the place has a language.

And if by some luck, the power were cut, the wheels slowed to a stop so that you suddenly saw it was not a solid object but so many separate bristles forming in motion a perfect circle, she would turn to you and say, 'Why?' Not the old why of why must I spend five nights a week? Just, 'Why?' Even if by some magic you knew, you wouldn't dare speak for fear of her laughter, which now you have anyway as she places the five tapering fingers of her filthy hand on the arm of your white shirt to mark you for your own, now and forever."

This poem of mine has one great line in it. It's from the Book of Job. I know that the reading has a theme, which is work, but it is pronounced job even though it's spelled J-O-B. That's a bad joke.

Now, if you don't find the line from the Book of Job, you may think one of the lines I wrote is a great line. So you must be on your toes so as not to confuse mediocrity with greatness. It's called "Among Children."

And many people object to that title because it reminds them of Yeats's poem, "Among School Children" And I asked them to suggest better titles, and they'd come up with worse titles. And then I'd say to them, I don't like the title either, but give me something better. And then I find out how pathetic they are as writers.

In fact, one of them also said-- she said, I don't like the way you use lacks, in that last poem I read. I remember that. This is my critic from Philadelphia. And she lacks 20 minutes before she can take a lunch break. She said, no one talks like that. But she's a rich woman from Philadelphia.

And back in Detroit, everybody said, my son lacks two years of being 18. I mean, I worked mainly with Southerners, and they used the word that way. So I had to correct her gently. You know how you have to deal with rich people. You have to be gentle. You're dumb, Dear. So you have to--

[LAUGHTER]

Excuse me. Ignorant, ignorant. You apologize, which people are-- they're different. They're beautiful people. They exist in their own sphere. I had a friend who was a rich woman. I wasn't trying to get her money away from her. I liked her. She was just a friend.

But she would always say, Mother called. And I would say, my mother? No, she'd say, Mother. Mother meant her mother. All the other mothers in the world were your mother and your mother and your mother, but her mother was just Mother.

When I was young, Mother would take me-- Father's sick today, she'd say. I'd say, my father's dead. But she just thought those parents of hers were comets or something, planets, polar stars. It was amazing. You have that little mother. I have this gigantic mother. All right. Here's "Among Children."

"I walk among the rows of bowed heads. The children are sleeping through fourth grade so as to be ready for what is ahead, the monumental boredom of junior high and the rush forward tearing their wings loose and turning their eyes forever inward. These are the children of Flint.

Their fathers work at the spark plug factory or truck bottled water in 5-gallon sea blue jugs to the widows of the suburbs. You can see already how their backs have thickened, how their small hands, soiled by pig iron, leap and stutter even in dreams. I would like to sit down among them and read slowly from the Book of Job until the windows pale and the teacher rises out of a milky sea of industrial scum, her gowns streaming with light, her foolish words transformed into song. I would like to arm each one with a quiver of arrows so that they might rush like wind there where no battle rages, shouting among the trumpets, 'Ha ha.' How dear the gift of laughter in the face of the eight-hour day, the cold winter mornings without coffee and oranges, the long lines of mothers in old coats waiting silently where the gates have closed.

10 years ago, I went among these same children, just born, in the bright ward of the Sacred Heart and leaned down to hear their breaths delivered that day, burning with joy. There was such wonder in their sleep, such purpose in their eyes closed against autumn, in their damp heads blurred with the hair of ponds. And not one turned against me or the light. Not one said, I am sick, I am tired, I will go home. Not one complained or drifted alone, unloved on the hardest day of their lives.

11 years from now, they will become the men and women of Flint or Paradise, the majors of a minor town. And I will be gone into smoke or memory. So I bow to them here and whisper all I know, all I will never know."

Just for my own sake, I always read the most recent poem I've written so that I can hear your reaction or not hear it. There is a decorum at poetry readings. No matter what happens, as you awaken from your slumbers to leave, you rush up to the poet and say the new poems are fantastic.

It doesn't matter how bad they are. The poet knows you're not telling the truth. It's just a decorum. It's like thanking your teacher for the class before he's given the grades out.

I'm kidding. Please don't do that unless you really like them or like it. This is-- it's only about 10 days old. It's a very small, little 10-day-old poem. But it has ambitions. And maybe if we all feed it enough, God knows what it might become. Some hideous epic.

[LAUGHTER]

It's called "Listen Carefully." "My sister rises from our bed hours before dawn. I smell her first cigarette and fall back asleep until she sits on the foot of the bed to pull on her boots. Knowing she's still naked from the waist up, I shouldn't look, but I do. She sees me looking and smiles, musses my hair, whispers something secret into my ear, something I can't tell anyone because it makes no sense.

Hours later, I awaken in an empty room, smelling of yesterday. The sunlight streams across the foot of the bed. And for a moment, I actually think it's Saturday, and I'm free.

Let me be frank about this. My older sister is not smart. I answer all her mail for her. And on Sundays, I even make dinner because the one cookbook confuses her, although it claims to be the way to a man's heart.

She wants to learn the way. She wants a husband, she tells me. But at 26, she's beginning to wonder. She makes good money doing piecework, assembling the cups that capped the four ends of a cross of a universal joint. It's part of a transmission.

I've seen her at work, her face cut with slashes of grease, while with tweezers, she positions the tiny rods faster than you or I could ever, her eyes fixed behind goggles, her mind God knows where, roaming over all the errors she thinks make her life. Her men aren't good to her, and she doesn't know why. I've seen the places they've hit and clawed to get what they want.

I've rubbed hand cream into the bruises on her shoulders. I've even cried along with her. By now, I think I know exactly what you're thinking. Although I don't get home until after 1:00 every night, we sleep in the same bed unless she's not there. If you're thinking there's no way we wouldn't be driven to each other, no way we could resist, no way someone as wronged as my beautiful sister could have a choice about something so basic, then the truth is, you're the one who's wrong. You haven't heard a word."

Do you know what prosody is? Prosody is the study of the movement of poetry. The dictionary calls it a science, but it's no more scientific than psychoanalysis.

Insofar as I'm famous-- poets are famous, unknown people-- I'm famous for this very slender line that's very elegant. It's the exact thing I'm not. You could dress me in Brooks Brothers, and two minutes later, I'd have torn everything.

And so I tried to dress myself in these very elegant lines. I also write fat lines when I feel full of things to say. I have a very fat-lined poem in here. But I publish a lot of my poetry in The New Yorker, and they pay by the line.

So it would seem idiotic to-- but actually, this one appeared in The New Yorker, and the skinny one didn't. So some of you can't be. There's no such thing as consistency. Anyway, this is called "A Theory Of Prosody." It's a very intricately rhymed and fussy poem. And it's my theory of why I write-- rhythmically, the way I write.

"When Nellie, my old pussycat, was still in her prime, she would sit behind me as I wrote. And when the line got too long, she'd reach one sudden black foreleg down and paw at the moving hand, the offensive one. The first time she drew blood, I learned it was poetic to end a line anywhere to keep her quiet.

After all, many mornings, she'd gotten to the chair long before I was even up. Those nights I couldn't sleep, she'd come and sit in my lap to calm me. So I figured I owed her the short cat line.

She's dead now almost nine years. And before that, there was one during which she faked attention, and I faked obedience. Isn't that what it's about? Pretending there's an alert cat who leaves nothing to chance."

I'd like to close with the title poem of my book, Sweet Will. Just after I wrote this poem, I read it at Yale. And a woman who taught at Yale came up to me, and she said, do you know Wordsworth uses that phrase "sweet will" much in the same way that you do? And I said, who?

And she said, Wordsworth. And I took out a pen as though I were going to write the name down. And she said, William Wordsworth. This assumption that, if I stole the bloody line, I know where I stole it from.

But there is a notion that poetry is written by these lunatics who never read anything, when, in fact, that's all we do with our lives is read and write and read and write. I mean, sure, you need inspiration, but you have to learn how to do something with it. And I'm still trying, friends.

Anyway, when I published the book, I quoted the whole passage from Wordsworth's great sonnet on Westminster Bridge, which was one of the first poems that absolutely knocked me cold. The name Stash appears in the poem. It was a name I heard much in my growing up. It was a kind of all-purpose name for a male of Polish descent. And it could be used in a chummy way and a friendly way and also in a very nasty way, much the way, say, the word "Dago," which derives from "Diego," can be used in a friendly or nasty way as an insult.

Detroit Transmission, where the poem takes place, is where transmission no longer exists, where transmissions then were made for Cadillacs. And that's how the Cadillacs get into the poem, that and the fact that I put them there. There are the names of some songs that were popular back when I was a kid-- Time on My Hands, which was actually the theme song of the prison at Flint, Michigan.

That's true. And Begin the Beguine, the great Cole Porter song. "Sweet Will." "The man who stood beside me 34 years ago this night fell onto the concrete, oily floor of Detroit Transmission. And we stepped carefully over him until he awakened and went back to his press.

It was Friday night. And the others told me that every Friday, he drank more than he could hold and fell. And he wasn't any dumber for it. So just let him get up at his own sweet will, or he'll hit you.

'At his own sweet will,' was just what the old Black man said to me. And he smiled the smile of one who is still surprised that dawn graying the cracked and broken windows could start us all to singing in the cold. Stash rose and wiped the back of his head with a crumpled handkerchief and looked at his own blood as though it were dirt and puzzled as to how it got there and then wiped the ends of his fingers carefully one at a time the way the mother wipes the fingers of a sleeping child and climbed back on his wooden Sodapop case to his punch press and hollered at all of us over the oceanic roar of work, addressing us by our names and nations-- Nigger, kike, honky, river rat. But he gave it a tune, an old tune like America the Beautiful.

And he danced a little two-step and smiled, showing the four stained teeth left in the front, and took another suck of cherry brandy. In truth, it was no longer Friday for night it turned to day as it often does for those who are patient. So it was Saturday in the year of '48 in the very heart of the city of man where your Cadillac cars get manufactured.

In truth, all those people are dead. They have gone up to heaven singing Time on My Hands or Begin the Beguine. And the Cadillacs have all gone back to Earth. And nothing that we made that night is worth more than me.

And in truth, I'm not worth a thing or with my feet and my two bad eyes and my one long nose and my breath of old lies and my sad tales of men who let the Earth break them back, each one to dirty blood or bloody dirt. Not worth a thing. Just like it was said at my magic birth when the stars collided and fire fell from great space into great space, and people rose one by one from cold beds to tend a world that runs on and on at its own sweet will." Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]