Transcripts

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Actually, when you campaign, you have a lot of time to sit around in hotel rooms. And you're not really as busy as people think you are. And sometimes the poem will come out of-- I think you're a little more alert when you're campaigning for the presidency probably, and sensitive to what you see, and trying to understand the community or the society that you're in.

And it was useful to have Robert Lowell with me because every so often, he would say, well, that really should be made into a poem. And you say, well, if you've got a poet like Lowell saying you've almost spoken a poem, you say, well, I'll work on it. And he did the same thing on another one. And this was out of the campaign.

You get these questions from people like Sam Donaldson, say, what would you do right now if you were president, about Vietnam? Well, you know, you don't know what you're going to do about it. And I said essentially this, which after Lowell told me it was poetic, I refined it a little bit. And it's called Vietnam Message. And it's about what I said to-- it wasn't Sam, it was somebody like him.

And the poem says, we will take our corrugated steel out of the land of thatched huts and bamboo, and take our bulldozers and tanks out of the land of the water buffalo, and take our flamethrowers and napalm out of the land that scarcely knows the use of matches, and take our helicopters out of the land of colored birds and butterflies.

We'll leave you your small joys and smaller troubles, your small farms and villages, your small and willing women, and trust you to your gods, some blind and some many-handed. It came out of the campaign and out of a silly question from a. And later on, why-- it justifies being called a poem, I think.

SPEAKER 2: Do you think the poetry kept you honest, in some way?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I think it helps. It keeps you sane and honest. I suppose if I'd been elected, I would have had to say, well, I told them what I was going to do, so there was no point in hesitating. Once you put it in a poem, it's pretty absolute.

SPEAKER 2: Why was Robert Lowell interested in your campaign?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, he was interested in the whole anti-war thing. He was involved before we had a campaign. He was at the Columbia riots. And he was at the March on the Pentagon. And he just-- I knew him, I think. I certainly knew about new people who knew him. But he just came just to be there. And he was against the war. But he was a pacifist in World War Two. And I think this was just a continuation of it.

SPEAKER 2: Was he your muse?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I don't know whether he was exactly my muse or not. I always appreciate he was one of the first poets to say I was a poet. You have to be grateful if you get a poet that established to say you're a poet. And he said-- he didn't say I was great at all, and I didn't expect him to. But he said to someone, I suppose someone was saying to him, what about McCarthy's poetry? And I was told he said, well, there's something worthwhile in every one of them.

SPEAKER 2: Do you think poetry and politics mix, or are they incompatible?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Oh, I don't think they're incompatible. I think poetry is a part of everything. And as we've set up these artificial distinctions, especially in this country. The politicians aren't as bad. If you really follow them, they do quote poetry. But the press and the public judgment on it is that the two shouldn't be mixed.

It may go back to Aristotle, who said that the politicians don't know and think they do. And poets do know and don't know that they know. So that you had kind of a hopeless, if you put the two together, it depends on what combination you get. If they got the worst of the politician and the worst of the poet that they don't know and don't know that they don't know, that's the worst combination. But if you've got a poet who does know and the politician who thinks that he knows, and what he thinks he knows is what the poet already knows, why, then you've got a good, positive position.

SPEAKER 2: Do you think there's something in our culture that doesn't allow people to embrace poets as leaders, poets as politicians?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I don't know. We don't have much of a record really, or even any kind of cultured person like the French, for example, like philosophers, or the Czechs had. And the Latin Americans, it's the same way. People like Neruda, he never had public office, but he had-- I mean, he wasn't elected. He held public office.

The Greeks had George Seferis, who was an ambassador in England and I think in other places. I don't know of any poet who has been made an ambassador of the United States. And that would seem to be a safe position in which to put a poet, or in the cabinet, for example.

SPEAKER 2: I'm struck by how many of these poems are a far cry from a public policy position paper. They seem to transcend this dirty business of politics. Did you ever feel that way?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I guess they do. But I've written a few political poems, not in this book. My communion poem, I think, I write it, which is pretty political. I've written a couple of poems. I have one poem called The Public Man, which is a commentary on public service and on politicians of some kind.

He walks even in daylight with arms outstretched. Fish-like, he shies at shadows. His own following him like a blind bloodhound, nose to the ground. Gray mist moves through the cavities of his skull. He feeds the sterile steers with cows with no desire on the mast of bitter grapes. He shades his eyes against fireflies in his own light, which once burned bright, is yellow tallow.

His voice rises like water from a cistern pump, twice used, and then go out in a wavering line like beagles in search of rabbits. Like a dull crying with tired voice, he looks back often into the fog. Each night, he holds his stone head between his hands, while his elbows slowly sink through the tabletop.

SPEAKER 2: What do you think would happen if more politicians tried to think like a poet?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I think it's bound to be better because I think everyone should-- you move from prose to poetry. And if you accept that poetry is an intensification of thought, why it's good to have people thinking with some intensity.

SPEAKER 2: How would America be transformed if poets took the helm?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I don't know. I think if you took my poem on Vietnam as having significance in terms of policy and interpret it into action, the poem came from the experience. But you could go from the poem to what should follow, it would have been good policy.

SPEAKER 2: It's almost spring. We'd like to hear you read a poem called March Equinox, 1968. And you wrote this in 1968. The "Equinox March 1968". It was right about the time of the New Hampshire vote. And I'd been making some speeches about New Hampshire and how it didn't bother people there in February.

You really waited until the equinox when they were alive and never taken the plastic off the storm doors. And that this was the time for decision in New Hampshire. And I think this was part of it in that spirit, the equinox is here. Anyway, I wrote the poems. And it has a reference to, well, it's in here.

September, whose foot is on the treadle that turns the burning stars who spun the whole world halfway around, since last you called. Come down, come down. Started in September, looked through a mournful rain, now set their sight again upon a world half night, half light. Men of distant years have said that much depends on change of seasons, on solstices and equinox, and they have given reason.

I disagree. Too much turns on inadvertence or what seems to be an accident of hand or knee, a chance sunrise, a glance of eyes, which way the river flows, and whether the wind blows, and other things that come and go, without regard for season or for reason. But just in case, they may be right on this strange night that marks the end of winter's fall for lifting help toward spring. Again, to you, I call.