Word: poems
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...Back to your Nobel lecture. You recited a line from your poem, where the narrator says, “Walk on air against your better judgment.” You offered this line as an instruction to yourself and all who listened. What does that mean...
...can’t change the world, but within the poem, things should be re-tuned at least. Maybe eventually, gradually, poems enter the consciousness of individuals, and then of a culture, and then has a general effect. But it’s on sensibility rather than politics...
...thought I’d read a few Harvard-related things. When I did the Phi Beta Kappa here in 1984, I read a poem called “Alphabets,” so I hope to read that. I never quite know what to read, but the Harvard situation—Sanders Theater, specifically—dictates some things. I read “Alphabets” first in Sanders, and it was written with Sanders in mind. It’s a rather beautiful theater...
...divided society. My poetry on the whole was earth-hugging, but then I began to look up rather than keep down. I think it had to do with a sense that the marvelous was as permissible as the matter-of-fact in poetry. That line is from a poem called “The Gravel Walks,” which is about heavy work—wheeling barrows of gravel—but also the paradoxical sense of lightness when you’re lifting heavy things. I like the in-betweenness of up and down, of being...
...It’s different in that you have the given, a shape to work with. You don’t have to conjure the material ‘thingness’ of the poem. It’s more like a jigsaw puzzle than anything else. At the same time, all the definitions of translation that I really like is that it’s writing by proxy. You get the satisfaction of finishing something without the penalty of having to start...